Exhibit Statement:

Jeffrey Dell and Rand Renfrow share an interest in the rendering systems used to depict complex and three-dimensional objects in space.  There are many: Renaissance perspective is sometimes the default in the visual arts, but isometric is common in instruction manuals,  games, and populist media. Essentially these modes of presenting space are intended to allow the viewer to more fully conceptualize it in their mind, and to understand it in certain aspects. It is about the display and its role in communication, but also about how to imaginatively enter into the image. Each method, whether broadly recognized or highly individual, is actually a distinct way of knowing. A photograph of a landscape does not give you the same understanding as a map of the same place. Each portrayal offers something concrete but is also necessarily incomplete. 

Each system has a syntax that is both culturally reinforced and affected by the mechanics and complexities of human perception. The use of one system of spatial depiction is generally used exclusively.  To jump in the middle of the image would be like changing tenses mid-sentence. 

Dell and Renfrow’s work illuminates the belief that there is no end or completion to these ways of knowing. The depiction is not just about the space – it is as much about the mind that seeks to understand it.  This is what fascinates the artists most: Renfrow in his incorporation of symbols within a syntax of display and hierarchy; Dell through a  shifting depiction of simple spatial structures. Each in their own way slows down the process of reading, the better to observe how the mind sees. These pieces hover in the hazy gaps between and across systems.  They question whether seeing is a “taking in” or a “projecting out.”  The work asks questions about the mind’s insistence on classifying within hierarchies, by investigating how these presentations can affect our classifications. Ultimately the work prompts viewers to reconsider their readings and misreadings in their own lives.