J.T. Kirkland’s manipulated wood wall sculptures are, for their basic simplicity, pretty remarkably consequential for a newly rising artist’s contribution to art.

Lengths of raw milled wood in different relationships and variously rent with patterns of holes, they manage to possess a prehistoric quality on the one hand, and on the other they contain a freshly contemporary basically hip aesthetic. They are simultaneous; synoptical. I don’t intend the latter word as much in its biblical connotation (well sort of), but a description of a semi-conscious integral process that occurs whenever an idea is created. It’s perhaps better stated for some as the accrual of the future to the present and the present to the past.

These refined cribbage board works emerge out of commercial grade materials purchased from local building supply houses. It is a grade and manner of wood that reveals its imperfections and transpiratory characteristics, the kind that would likely be primed and painted or sheetrocked over for being too sincere about its origins and organic systems.

Instead of providing the classic craftsperson with homogeneous perfection, these rip cut slabs instead offer a de facto landscape from the contributing tree’s long dark horizon heart, concentric, radiating rings looking like endless oceans, mountain ranges and clouds, and occasional capillary pools where branches once sprang.

Into the nomadic narrative of the board grain, the artist perforates his orderly system of holes - tiny fanatical abysses in regimental rows. The etymological cribs of cribbage - these small, dark holes are receptacles of sorts. Whether they hold the unfathomable, represent a methodical process of seeking but not quite finding, or stand in for a kind of counting, mapping or marking system possibly even apart from the art object itself, they happen as well to represent the rational brain attempting to apprehend the elusive natural world, to make its way home.

This mechanical undertaking applied to an event or product of nature is what invites the prehistoric quality into the work. It discloses that even earliest human business has always been perceptively excluded from the inside secret of nature, trying to survive it, to fit in to its plan but also to shape and outwit it.

J.T. Kirkland’s work, oddly enough, given its simple, cool, rational, reductionist and almost innocent demeanor, still prompts a consideration of the ongoing strategies of homo sapiens to work out, through math and ritual, their metaphorical expulsion from pure, holy instinct.

Deborah McLeod
January 14, 2007

Deborah McLeod is a critic for the Baltimore City Paper and an independent curator.