Maggie Cardelùs

Deitch Projects, New York
Through February 10

The extravagantly composed centerpiece of Maggie Cardelùs’ installation at Deitch Projects was a nearly floor-to-ceiling sculpture created from filaments and ribbons of shredded colored photographs. These were intricately twisted, folded, and intertwined into complex three-dimensional forms that were then laced together and suspended from the ceiling. Spot lit from below and above, the sculpture had the volume, shape, and shimmering appearance (from both the lamps and the white backs of the paper strands) of a grand, spun glass Murano chandelier.

In spite of its large size, and the density of its intricately woven and laced together material, the work had a remarkable lightness of touch. It occupied the gallery less like a solid volume than a wild drawing of tangled lines articulating, but not filling, its space. In the corner of one wall there hung a portrait photograph. Out of this was cut a screen of converging lines, which left whole only the sitter’s face. Several small-scale, exquisitely formed constructions of cut and folded paper also hung—as if they were hovering insects—from thin threads throughout the room.

In earlier works, Cardelùs has employed cut photographs charged with personal significance, such as one showing her pregnant. In the central piece on display at Deitch, however, no legible image remained from the fully shredded photographic paper from which it was made. This gave the sculpture a suggestive, but perhaps too inscrutable, air, as if some smoldering feeling was present but incompletely disclosed.

Still, the very process of using cut apart photographs to fabricate entirely novel forms does imply an attempt to look back on, and transform, one’s experience, to rewrite one’s past. Cardelùs’ work suggests such a delicate manipulation of memory, even if the full content of that recollection remains withheld.




Jonathan Gilmore