Jeff Feld’s invented, minimalist island of Feldwood transports its audience into a tropical, still space that is at once childlike and naive, holy in its fetishizing of the pathetic object and rooted in place.
A candy-wrapper golden sun shines down on Jeff Feld’s show, When I Stopped in Feldwood, New York. Feldwood appears to us as a desert island of tropical relics: an unusually large, oval coconut, a circular sheet of goatskin, a palm tree cutout, a radio antenna-like tree, coconut husks, a long, multicolored candy necklace, small concrete structures, chewed, gold-leafed gum, a photograph of potted plants, an axe. The show’s sandy-beached aesthetic is funny, considering the work was made in Ridgewood, Queens.
Feld lives and works out of an incongruously small house on a street of tall buildings in Ridgewood. He creates his artwork from materials collected in the streets of his neighborhood. He is inspired by the detritus he finds around him: butcher paper, cardboard, bits of wood, product wrappers. He brings these into his home and alchemizes them into artworks that are simple, playful and minimalist, patiently blowing a breeze of new life into them.
It’s clear that he takes great care and deliberation in his craft. It is not odd to imagine sitting for hours, staring into the flimsy, crumpled materials as he works, pondering his next move. In Oya, he stains ripped brown paper with dabs of latex, carefully sewing a thin line of yellow thread along its lower left side, and painstakingly painting Oya in white bubble letters near its top right, surrounded by a strip of navy blue, playing on the word ‘Goya’, a popular Hispanic brand sold at supermarkets near his home. The composition and choice of color are balanced and interesting to look at, as is the strong sense of place. Whispers of beaches and tropical weather may not be based in New York City’s reality, but they are rooted in Feld’s found materials, as clues of Ridgewood’s underlying Venezuelan and Ecuadorian narratives.
In Points of Attachment, the artist fastidiously casts and paint-matches necklace candies in hydrocal. It would be one thing to display a candy necklace. It is quite another, absurd thing, to spend hours recreating one, just to hang it limp, strung together, on a steel hook. That’s what makes the work extraordinary: the amount of time and attention Feld gifts to useless objects that we barely notice, without making grand transformations, but instead humble ones that just point back to these objects as they are, joyfully pathetic. Feld’s use of meager materials combined with his minimal intervention, creates pieces that are unassuming and straightforward in what they are.
It is difficult to discuss Feld’s work without conjuring Richard Tuttle’s, whose profound respect for the almost-nothing is one echoed by Feld, elevating materials not in appearance but in spirituality, a realm that is beyond skill, imbuing them with new vibrancy and meaning. In the two paintings entitled Baum, we find masking tape, cardboard and enamel, with depictions of mushroom-like colorful trees. They are naive, abstracted, satisfying, and similarly in the pieces Zeichen and Untitled (Problem View), cartoonish cutout forms pop against their colorful backdrops, Gestalt symbols that transport us into a childlike place where open-ended exploration and boyish adventure are the compass for discovering deep and universal truths about life’s meaning.
Jeff Feld is the Robinson Crusoe of Feldwood. He creates myriad apparitions that build up a playful and believable world that exists both geographically and spiritually, a time-suspended universe of deeply-loved form, matter and color, where he exists alone in his protected and beautiful ever-expanding constructed island.
When I Stopped in Feldwood, New York, Jeff Feld at Marquee Projects, 14 Bellport Lane, Bellport, New York 11713, April 11 – May 24 @marqueeprojects
About the writer: Sivan Lavie is a poet, arts writer, and visual artist based in New York City. Sivan published chapbooks with Inkfish Studio and Earthbound Press, and her poems, criticisms, and short stories appear in Hobart Pulp, SPECTRA Poets, SUDS Zine, KEITH LLC, Happy Apples Press, Kids of Dada, Avenir Magazine, and Lyra. @s.i.v.a.n.w.o.r.l.d
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