Jade Townsend Review

Thinking back on the Armory Art Fair Week, 2013, I compare it to a vast landscape of art, somewhat blended into colors and forms as I passed them by.

Bursting through that otherwise conglomerate fog of memories is Jade Townsend's installation, "Ship of Fools" at the Volta Fair. Jade Townsend's work is hard to forget.

He presents a stage set, curtains, characters and devices. The halves of two ships are at sea heading in opposite directions. One vessel appears to be a commercial ship, the other is a warship outfitted with weaponry. The staged ocean waves appear in consecutive rows, cresting in opposite directions. Under the two vessels, clothed legs descend to the floor. They are men, the engines of commerce, aggression, the eternal push-pull. On the floor are wooden planks. Each symbolizing a death in the continuum. We are all walking the plank.

We are forced off the end by our inner pirate. It's the truth, and it's a damn nightmare. But then again, maybe it's all a nostalgic family-friendly display at a carnival.

"Ship of Fools" begins a story that you're left to finish. The facts here are simultaneously acute and obtuse. We sense the specificity of Townsend's historical and aesthetic research, but it feeds a mystery.

This yin and yang acts as a catalyst that allows a fundamental truth to be "almost" revealed - like a perfectly performed strip tease. In the end we get the essence of the piece with a tingling sensation in that part of our brain that controls secret, embarrassing knowledge of human yearning.

The time period is insignificant because the real subject is the constant condition of civilization's twisted underwear. Townsend plays it like a harmonium.

Jade Townsend approaches his work like one would construct a building. He treats his works like a doodle pad, making drawings that feed the sculptures and installations.

In return, the installations and sculptures inform and feed the drawings.

Up close, we notice the tonal textures, pieces of layered parchment paper and over-worked areas that give the paper a new dimension.

It is a visceral and humorous "fog," and we are entertained by the theater this stirs in our own minds - captains of our own odd meandering ships.

Townsend's "Ship of Fools" was presented at Volta 2013 by Gallery Poulsen (Copenhagen). Morten Poulsen calls Townsends work "figurative, political, satirical pop art, if pop art existed in the 15th century."