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Essay by Stephen Cleland There is a lightness to the way that a mole hill is grounded, a lightness that defines itself not against, but in relation to, mass, material, gravity and ground. More importantly this new lightness is an effect linked to the multiplication of orientations, positions and movements.1 Greg Lynn's description of "lightness" as a trope in contemporary architecture seems an apt mode by which to approach Jason Lindsay's sculpture. In particular, Lindsay's introduction of strong angular forms and planes to his box-like assemblages strikes a cord with the multifarious systems of architecture that concern Lynn. And yet, it is the forms of mimicry active in Lindsay's angular play that confounds a straightforward generic placement of his work. The points at which he tugs at tropes of an architectonic logic, for instance, are the exact places in which his practise collides with the problem of abstraction in contemporary painting, sculpture and installation. Lindsay's desire to pull more generic content into an essentially sculptural vocabulary that utilizes industrial and mass-processed materials, that is to say, seems to develop out of an interest in complicating our sense of the relation of different creative practises. By obfuscating the utility at the core of architectonic logic, Lindsay's sculptural semblances achieve a rare blend of humour and serious aesthetic purpose. Jason's last solo exhibition, Autumn Collection Symptomatic Treatment at Special Gallery2, included a 'new season' range of pseudo bed-side lamps--a tongue-in-cheek play on the "limpid Freedom Furniture catalogue objects"3. These were dotted around an expansively sprawled installation of irregular boxes and stilts made of MDF, pine, cardboard and hessian. The work liberally traversed boundaries between high art and craft, and seemed an aesthetically liberated experiment in form and juxtaposition. In similar ways, the playfully-titled The Very Best Of Woody Allen, at the George Fraser Gallery4, combined traditional building materials with James Hardy weatherboards to form large-scale, free-standing walls. Where was Woody Allen? Certainly no here. But apart from the obvious pun on the comedian's name, I did think that Allen's satire of the existentialist rhetoric surrounding High Modernist painting in "Play It Again, Sam"5 sheds light on Lindsay's playful treatment of the materiality of things. Lindsay's work for Window is large, but no overwhelming. It speaks of an architectonic immediacy, the dialectic of planar forms pulled from various types of construction, and yet ideologically skewed from their points of origin. The work, that is to say, enters into a discussion of painting. the overlaid batons that sprawl at irregular angles across the face of his construction are the only polished elements in a raw planar structure, but they retain a distinct opticality. Manually sanded, they absorb in an almost illusionary way from the diffused light from Window's lightboxes. The interrelationship of genre reveals the complex logic of the work, which engages in a discussion between sculpture and digitality, between digital degradation and the vector-graphic, and the scaleless trajectory of line and planar forms. The memory of the underlying structure of a wall, with studs and nogs spaced in a uniform standardisation, evokes middle-class standardisation, but here planes menacingly avoid right angles. Lindsay's work may no, then, be separated from the architecture of everyday--rather, his work represents a simultaneity across creative processes. What most interests me in Jason's work is the way that his processes are aligned to a kind of opening up of the parameters of space and time. What is important in the sculpture is not that it represents space, but rather, that it complicates our relation to a discourse of spatial logic. Rather than being merely a visual or aesthetic problem, the work represents the complex play of simulacra. Lindsay's visuality, that is to say, sits between a graphic representation that is essentially scaleless and the surface dexterity of a sculptural process that plays with the scale of the everyday.
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