Sean Sullivan at Devening Projects
The warble of a chord emanating from a rigged toy organ fills the room in Sean Sullivan’s exhibition “Within the shade of a tree.” It quivers and rings and hums after which, as if sound might be a picture, fades out of view. Your focus strikes elsewhere.
Greater than twenty mixed-media works are hung in a single line across the gallery like an optical poem, taking on surprisingly little house. No composition is bigger than a sq. foot. But upon these little surfaces, Sullivan expresses lots.
By animating a hodgepodge of supplies, textures, and patterns, these items exhibit the makeshift peculiarities of home crafting. A number of vignettes recall miniature interiors: In a single compartmentalized development, Rooms of various temperature and feeling, angled slopes learn as unadorned stairwells, whereas within the high-relief You’re taking the spirit in (each 2021) bits of froth, wire, and cardboard turn into a fixture that calls to thoughts an architectural decoration. Regardless of their playful, diminutive scale, these works are extricated by abstraction from twee, treacly territory.
Distinct from Sullivan’s delicate draftsmanship, the works are fairly sculptural. As in shadowboxes, cardboard perimeters and partitions protrude from their surfaces, which carry dainty miscellanea. However what these shallow receptacles primarily maintain is colour, which the artist turns into one thing palpably bodily, object-like. Evoking a serviceable but slapdash placement of paint on a palette, every hue—be it a smear of white, a blob of blue, or a wash of grey—utilized in its personal distinctive manner holds its personal. Sullivan’s elegantly crude tableaux come from working with what you have got, however they voice the fun of discovering what you could have forgotten. It’s stirring how a morsel of one thing can maintain one’s consideration, unearthing a reminiscence or delivering a quiet (but marvelous) revelation.
— Alexandra Drexelius
