Independent 20th Century 2023

Jane Lombard Gallery is pleased to present a solo booth with Allan Wexler for  the 2023 edition of Independent 20th Century Art Fair.  A trained architect, Wexler has been producing functional absurdities for over fifty years that bridge and interrogate distinctions between human activity and the built environment. Featuring diverse works spanning media from drawing to sculpture, the presentation will center on themes of connectivity, constructedness, and ritual. In tandem with the booth presentation, Coffee Seeks Its Own Level, a work that epitomizes the main tenets of Wexler's practice, will be activated in Booth B8 on September 7 from 4PM - 6PM. 

Fascinated by the seemingly infinite ritualistic details of the Japanese tea ceremony, Wexler created Coffee Seeks Its Own Level as a way to investigate the social implications of performative ritual. Working with group dynamics, Wexler often utilizes a set group of four as a recurring motif in his work. As Wexler explains, “It is about four people at the table drinking coffee simultaneously. Because the coffee cups are connected by tubing, when one gets raised, the unleveling causes the coffee to overflow the other three cups. It is about playing with coordination among the guests. The remnants of such performances remain as stains of the white tablecloth”.

With wit and ingenuity, the selected works investigate the ways in which the day-to-day objects of our environment mediate social activity. They often stage delicate, unexpected interactive sites as catalysts for interpersonal connectivity. Some works highlight the isolating capacity of certain tasks while others create a sense of fragility that forces participants to navigate the environment together. 4 Collars Sewn Into A Tablecloth, 1991, conflates the solitary, routine act of dressing oneself with the spontaneity and company of communal dining. The nature of the work implies a contradictory isolating sense of community: dinner guests are connected at the seams yet physically restricted, sewn into place. The drawing 4 Handled Broom, 1991, on the other hand, visually transforms the mindless solitude of sweeping into an intentional symbiotic act as one envisions the collective coordination required to effectively operate such a tool.

Wexler’s fabricated scenes are strange and unconventional, urging viewers to consider similarly unconventional means of collaborative problem-solving. At the same time, viewers are encouraged to seek and acknowledge the constructedness and absurdity of those entrenched daily activities that are arbitrarily deemed ‘normal.’ Described as a “radical deconstructor of habitation,” Wexler aims to do just that - to look more deeply into what surrounds us and to reconsider and question the actions we tend to perform without a second thought. Understanding Wexler’s practice is an exercise in recontextualization, “my work is about finding poetry in something that seems purely functional. I take an object, destroy its function, and play with it until I discover a new function”.  Wexler exposes the conceptual world that informs our lived experiences, questions the conditions of its construction and turns it on its head.