Portfolio: Jared Handelsman

by Beth E. Wilson, February 25, 2008

If artistic intellect could be described, like organic chickens, as free-range, Jared Handelsman would surely be one of its leading proponents. The day I came to speak with him, we sat in front of an open wood stove as he heated small rocks red hot, then imprinted them onto accordion-folded pieces of drawing paper. On a nearby table, row upon row of these ingenious little sculptures sat stretched out, punctured by the holes seared into them.

Handelsman’s intriguing photographic work is currently on view at the Center for Photography at Woodstock through March 30, and at Bard College at Simon’s Rock in Great Barrington through March 28. For more information, visit www.cpw.org or www.simons-rock.edu.

Rocks and space
I started using photography when I was doing installations outside, suspending a rock a few inches above where it had laid in the forest. I was fascinated with the fact that you couldn’t get inside the rock. You were picking the rock up, and you could see that interface with the ground that once was the identity of the rock. What kind of turned me off of doing them [the sculptures] was that to get opportunities to do them I had to resort to photography. I would show photographs in the gallery, and have a map of the grounds, of where to look for them, documentation. Often people would come back when I’d done three sculptures out in the woods and they would report that they’d found five of them. The photography was a way to disarm that—it identified the work, but it didn’t serve the sculptures well. I was amazed by photography, the latent image emerging—I love working in the darkroom, but it seemed like a shame that it was in the service of sculpture, and not serving sculpture very well.

At a certain point, I decided to just try some photographs. The first things I did were these photograms of rocks. As soon as I realized that I could get at the same thing, the same idea, using photography rather than documenting the sculptures, I stopped using it [photography] as part of the sculptures. They are photograms of quartzite pebbles, with very long exposures under an enlarger. Hour long exposures, and I chose rocks that have an irregular surface, so they sit up off the paper to allow light leakage around the edges. The white quartzite reflects the light off the white paper. I was just blown away that I could get into the same thing I was doing with the sculptures, in such a direct way. Seeing that space where there was that contact, and having an imprint of that mysterious place where gravity somehow becomes one thing, it becomes ground.

The tension of intentions
I like discovering things you would never have imagined, or could anticipate, without engaging in the process. I am really of the belief that it’s really valuable to engage in the process, but not because of the process, but because of getting somewhere you couldn’t imagine through the revelations of the material, that the material can actually show you things, if you’re open to it. I would often talk, years ago, about the tension of intentions. You kind of need an intention to engage in anything, but that intention is incidental, ultimately, because if you’re a slave to that intention, you risk missing the main thread that appears as a digression. It reveals something about that intention that’s profound, and also can open up a whole other way of thinking and looking at things. You need the intention, but it’s incidental, a catalyst. What I see often, with artists, is that people often get caught up in their intentions, and close down, learn not to get distracted from their intention, and really focus on perfecting something to the point where it becomes less and less interesting.