The puzzle collages of Rachel Schmidhofer highlight human visual perception by exploiting the quirks of seemingly innocuous puzzle-making templates, often intermixing celebrated works of art with the intricate, colorful, yet ultimately mundane subject matter that puzzles often depict. Pairs and trios of 300 and 500 piece puzzles, each with matching patterns, morph together in retinal pyrotechnics like a mirage going in and out of focus, like pixels finding their way to an ultimately fractured, senseless result. A mountain landscape interrupted by a mélange of meat, a basket of kittens mashed up with a rainbow— whatever the expected imagery, it’s full of glitches, exemplifying the preamble of Georges Perec’s 1978 masterpiece Life, a user’s manual:   “The two pieces so miraculously conjoined are henceforth one, which in its turn will be a source of error, hesitation, dismay and expectation… The role of the puzzle-maker is hard to define.”

Keith Nelson’s blend of found material and diametrically opposed emblems of late 20th century minimalism— dirty, plebian, conceptual gestures sourced from curbside scrap heaps, fetishized for the contemporary parlor (else a stout reinvigoration, the same affirmation of form Donald Judd espoused, with a more personal, more responsible and far more pertinent repurposing without the needy pretense)— be they astutely placed scraps of particle board and wood from a failed basement soffit or lost midwestern grandmother’s abandoned aesthetic made contemporary, or a 400 thread count designer pillowcase action-painted with your snoring husband’s unspoken dream drool— High Art is never far away from bodily human beauty. As an act of upcycling and resourcefulness— like a banjo playing Bach, like rain on an old tin roof— Nelson’s sculptures remind us that some beautiful music can’t make sense and we’re all the better for it if we’re still paying attention. We squat on ceramic sculpture, we sleep on silken paintings, we throw it all away like we’re lucky. 

Keith Nelson lives and works in Milwaukee. Rachel Schmidhofer lives and works in Brooklyn and Pittsburgh.

The show run through June 5, 2021. The gallery is open by appointment and open hours may be listed on Instagram.