Review

A review of Jason Peters: Anti.Gravity.Material.Light

Jason Peters with his "Seduction of a Muse" at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art. According to the artist, “When you can come to art and create something personal with it, you might actually remember that experience longer.” Photo: courtesy of the museum

Oklahoma City Museum of Art
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
January 28 — April 11, 2010

Jason Peters is best known for his undulating sculptures made with plastic buckets.

Anti.Gravity.Material.Light includes several examples of these luminously playful pieces. The exhibition also includes works on paper (hand-cut drawings based on the sculptures) that generally feel more like preparatory sketches than finished pieces.  Understood as such, these works shed light on Peters’s site-specific creative process. Unfortunately, the other works in the show do not live up to the buckets’ promise. Sculptures that geometrically arrange fluorescent lights around other forms, including, in the case of Frailty of Structural Chaos, an assemblage of metal chair frames, are supposed to be interesting because they introduce the ideas of Sol LeWitt and Dan Flavin to the readymade aesthetic of Marcel Duchamp.  The simple truth, however, is that this conversation has become boring.

Jason Peters, installation view of "Visceral Paradigm." Photo: Paul Houston, courtesy of the museum

Luckily, we have the madcap, surging energy of the bucket sculptures to distract us from the smug intellectual pleasures of hard-edge geometry — and when we get to a piece like Seduction of a Muse, we are suddenly much more convinced of Peters’s claim that his work has a “visceral” appeal (it is regrettable that the installation obscures Seduction’s subtle plastic glow with the bright lights of another geometric piece, Visceral Paradigm). In Seduction, red and yellow nested buckets curve organically through the gallery, inviting visitors to walk not just around but into the spaces they create. The allusions here feel Tim Burton-esque, as Peters enhances what he describes as the buckets’ “inherent beauty” by illuminating them from the inside, transforming the workaday into fantasy.

Jason Peters, "I Am All Ways In One," site-specific installation (presented in a dark room) of plastic buckets, mirrors, and light, dimensions variable . Photo: courtesy of the museum

The sculptures revel in contradictions like this: fragile but architectural, they feel simultaneously like roller-coasters and oversized toys (remember the Tangle™?). One in particular, I Am All Ways In One, fills an entire gallery with illuminating and illusive fun — glowing in the dark, the buckets dip and weave around each other before terminating in mirrored surfaces that paradoxically make them appear to continue almost infinitely — as does the delight of the gallery’s visitors.

Jason Peters, "Seduction of a Muse," site-specific installation of plastic buckets, light. Photo: courtesy of the museum.

From the Review calendar:

Oklahoma City Museum of Art
415 Couch Drive
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
405-236-3100
Hours remaining for this exhibition: Thursday, April 8, 10 a.m.-9 p.m., Friday & Saturday, April 9 & 10, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., and Sunday, April 11, noon-5 p.m.

Jason Peters: Anti.Gravity.Material.Light
Last Call Thursday: April 8, 5-10 p.m. Featuring mini-tours of the exhibition and permanent collection galleries, door prizes, a cash bar, and coffee tastings provided by Cafe Evoke and Elemental Coffee, with live broadcasts by Ferris O'Brien (of 105.3 The Spy FM) and music by SpyLab DJ Blake Ward (until 9 p.m.). Admission is $5 after 5 p.m. (free always to members), and a special $5 menu will be available from the Museum Cafe.
January 28 — April 11

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