12/14/13 Jacqueline Tarquinio’s Poetic Storage - Decoy Magazine

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Jacqueline Tarquinio, Useless Words,2012. Courtesy of Exercise Gallery.

Jacqueline Tarquinio: Welcome to your day @ Exercise Gallery, June 15 – July 14, 2012

Like a series of reimagined storage systems, Jacqueline Tarquinio’s current exhibitionat Exercise seems to chart a process of poetic organization. Images are organized like words,and utilitarian objects are arranged in painterly strokes. Through and through, the studio becomesa major player in this composition, in all of its mundane daily inspiration, like an amateur actor inan ironic role.

Set up as makeshift tableaux, black metal grates become a framework for each composition, bothliterally and metaphorically, operating as a kind of grid that we are forced to stare through. Visionis disrupted, and then reorganized. In Welcome to your day (2012) the image of a touristicwaterfall is obstructed like the view through a fence on the edge of a construction site. The gridbecomes a device for calling attention to the reality of a segmented viewpoint, and the potentialthat a limited view might add to the process of abstraction. I am reminded of the way thatpainters often map out a rough sketch for a painting on a grid in order to transpose it on a largerscale. Are Tarquinio’s works then maquettes for a future work, for a larger work?

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Jacqueline Tarquinio’s Poetic Storage

By: Jacquelyn Ross Written On: July 10, 2012

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12/14/13 Jacqueline Tarquinio’s Poetic Storage - Decoy Magazine

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Jacqueline Tarquinio, Proof of Existence of the Outside World, 2012. Courtesy of Exercise Gallery.

In Proof of Existence of the Outside World (2012) the same waterfall is shown behind the sameblack grate, this time pixelated, in a double take on the gridded abstraction. No material isprecious or refined, idealistic or permanent; instead, every composition is crude and temporary,made to look like it could be remade at any moment. Fifteen Minute Lunch Break (2012) featuresa staggered set of grids hung from the ceiling, each with a glossy conglomerate of red grapesdangling below it. And despite a kind of messy aesthetic, there is something smooth andpredictable about the whole thing. Like a strange kind of miniature, a temporary stage suggestsnarratives are everywhere, but never seems to surpass simple ‘suggestions’. Suggestions forwhat? Scripts? Poems? Like modest collections of experiences that seem familiar, but cliché,Tarquinio’s provisional set ups are difficult to digest, which I would argue, is a good thing.

12/14/13 Jacqueline Tarquinio’s Poetic Storage - Decoy Magazine

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And there is something provocative about putting images and objects on a ‘rack’ for display thatseems to me to be not so different from the way words are arranged within the confines of apage. Both have pragmatism in their approach that is as much about communication as it isabout subjectivity. Stripped of the romanticism that so often clouds notions of the artist’s studioand of artistic expression, Jacqueline Tarquinio’s works suggest that behind every goodcomposition (whether of images, ideas, or propositions) is, perhaps, simply the right storagesystem.

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