Susie Brandt, “Wha?,” safety orange flagging tape, river teeth; bobbin lace, 2024, 100 x 166 x 26 in Photo by Kat Miller

Grids are everywhere. They underlie many basic structures of nature. They’re used in mathematics and geometry, cartography, computer modeling and design (where, because many conform to the golden ratio, they supposedly are more pleasing to the eye). In the corporate world, there are the grids of spreadsheets and a leadership style known as “the managerial grid model.”

Certain kinds of art, not surprisingly, are also permeated by grids – from Albrecht Dürer and Leonardo da Vinci, to more obvious modern examples such as Piet Mondrian, Sol LeWitt, Chuck Close and Agnes Martin. That’s where “Off Grid” at Space (through July 20) and “Whereabouts? Susie Brandt” at Speedwell Contemporary (through Aug. 10) come in.

“Each artist’s material, formal, and process-based exploration of grids, weaves, braids, and materials,” explains the exhibition description for the Space show, “is grounded in unique conceptual investigations of the world around them and worlds not visible to us.”

This is immediately clear upon entering the gallery as we are confronted with Portland-based Elana Marte Adler’s enormous “This Is an Iceberg. You Are Floating.” It took months for Adler to sew together this sculpture, which is composed of interconnected, three-dimensional open boxes made of rip stock nylon. Hung from the ceiling and walls, it floats in the atmosphere of the gallery like the iceberg of its title would float in an ocean.

It is a geometrically abstract form that very effectively conveys an iceberg’s mass, suspension and even color gradation from white to aqua to deep blue. It emanates a monumental yet soft and welcoming presence. Technically, this sculpture continues the thread of an earlier work called “I Can See Through Your Barriers,” another suspended fabric grid, that one featuring units of linear measure called “handbreadth” (2.5-4 inches). This unit is used in Judaic traditions to construct a sukkah, a temporary shelter built communally for the Jewish autumn festival of Sukkot.

“Iceberg” has no religious content, but it does make a point. By using the iceberg as a metaphor for invisible dangers beneath the surface (cue the Titanic), Adler is cautioning us about climate change. Its benign appearance suddenly takes on another dimension.

Elana Marte Adler’s “This Is an Iceberg. You Are Floating” at the center of the “Off Grid” exhibition at Space. Photo by Joel Tsui

Other Adler works are more theoretical contemplations, as with “Structure of a Pile,” a pyramidal grid that sits on the floor. The germination of this sculpture was a salt pile visible from her former studio in Chicago where her fellow exhibition mate, Matt Brett, also worked. Here, Adler is toying with something called the “sorites paradox” or “paradox of the heap,” which can be interpreted as a kind of musing on identity. If we remove a grain of sand from a heap (or in this case a grain of salt), it does not become a “non-heap.” But if we do this repeatedly until only one grain remains, can we still characterize it as a heap, and at what point did it transform into something other than that?

This question of identity actually offers a perfect segue to the works of Jesse Harrod, a nonbinary artist based in Philadelphia and New York. These wall sculptures are made using paracord and the macramé process, then they are cast in brass. Other works consist of felt shapes stitched to a background. It won’t take viewers long to discern that most, if not all, of them recall female genitalia. Orifices abound, and the decorativeness of the process, conjoined to the gold coloration of the brass, lend them a seductive power.

Some of Harrod’s videos, not on display but easily accessed on their site, feature male genitalia as well (a singing phallus, another forming the fuselage of a plane, a be-sequined phallic finger puppet). Or they might include outsized female sexual organs touching and erupting with pleasure.

Unquestionably, we are amidst Harrod’s multifarious explorations of gendered and queer identities, which is consonant with the identity question behind Adler’s “Pile.” The brass pieces, which weigh about 75 or 80 pounds, are mesmerizingly meticulous and complex, folding in on themselves, creating varied textures through knotting and braiding. The titles are also suggestive, alternately inviting (“Come Inside”) and blocking entrance (“Crossed Legs”).

Finally, there is Richmond, Virginia-based Matt Keyhoe Brett, whose work here is quite diverse. There is “Self Portrait as a Sack of Potatoes,” a Hydrocal plaster sculpture in which the artist’s face emerges from said sack. The grid theme is barely apparent here until you look at the bag’s surface, which mimics the woven grid of a burlap sack.

“Residue of Collapse” by Elana Marte Adler and, at right, Matt Keyhoe Brett’s “Self Portrait as a Sack of Potatoes” Photo by Joel Tsui

However, what’s interesting about this is the sense of emergence of the potato and face forms from an underlying matrix. The matrix, in fact, is the thing, which Brett explores in several other pieces, namely “Carousel 1” and “Carousel 2” (as well as cyanotypes of these). They are elegant sculptures created from galvanized wire mesh, bailing wire, epoxy clay and acrylic paint. They are tremendously subtle, at first appearing like simple mesh cylinders. But a closer look reveals that Brett has snipped some of these wires on one end and pushed them in at various angles, suggesting the genesis of an interior shape within the more obvious cylindrical matrix.

This immediately recalled for me a 3-D computer modeling program, where forms emerge from the manipulation and warping of the grid matrix. This raises questions about all sorts of technological fears, such as the idea of robotic creatures replacing humans, controlled alternate virtual realities or the many concerns surrounding artificial intelligence. In Brett’s sculptures, we get the sense that we, too, are ineluctably digitally fabricated out of nothing from a matrix directed by some mysterious, unknowable force.

SENSE OF PLACE

Susie Brandt’s “Whereabouts?” at Speedwell Contemporary is less heady than the Space show. But it is synergistic, too, particularly in its technical exactitude, the way grids also buttress much of the work on display and, in a less obvious sense, the way each piece is connected to a specific place on the earthly grid created by lines of latitude and longitude.

In fact, Brandt calls it her “landscape show,” though the uninitiated won’t know what that means. Essentially, through practices of various fiber techniques, Brandt is creating art that is about place-making. Just inside the door to the left is “All the Walks/Red Rickrack,” which appears like an irregular grid of red threads with rickrack applications that resemble camo nets the Army would use to disguise a tank in the woods.

Susie Brandt, “All the Walks/Red Rickrack,” fabricated in 2012 of rickrack and thread; machine stitched. Using the pattern of GPS tracks of walks taken every day the artist was in Baltimore from Jan. 1 – Dec. 31, 2010, 76 x 48 in Photo by Kat Miller

This is, however, a conceptual map of Baltimore and a piece of process art. Using GPS, Brandt recorded daily walks around Baltimore from Jan. 1 to Dec. 31, 2010. The underlying irregular grid was sewn onto a water-soluble laundry bag fabric. When washed, the fabric dissolves, leaving the delicate netting. The routes of her year of walks were then articulated in rickrack. The piece is, in other words, a map of Baltimore’s topography.

Brandt uses the same technique with “Sifter” and “Smidge.” These are landscapes of memory rather than actual places. The delicate netting is produced the same way as “Walks.” But in the former, she cut out shapes from her deceased friend Peter Marvit’s abundant collection of aloha shirts, painted one side of them orange and then applied them to the netting in a circular configuration that implied an opening in the tree canopy outside a window at Marvit’s home, metaphorically conjuring a portal to the heavens.

Susie Brandt, “Sifter,” aloha shirt bits netted in safety orange thread, made in memory of Peter Marvit, 2015, 96 x 96 in Photo by Kat Miller

“Smidge” came about after someone found her through social media and offered her bolts and bolts of fabric that had belonged to the person’s mother, Violet Noble Goodwill. Many had polka dots on them, which Brandt cut out using pinking shears (giving them zigzag borders) and applied onto a white netting that casts shadows on the wall behind it. The resulting piece looks like a curtain of rain, or an environment. Like “Sifter,” this is a landscape of memory for Goodwill’s now-vanished presence on Earth.

Other works incorporate other grid-based processes: Hooked rugs created in the same shapes and patterns of rubbings she did of various storm drains and tree stump crosscuts, which she then returned to the places of the original rubbing and photographed on top of the rug’s source inspiration. There are woven rugs patterned with a silhouette of Brandt’s body or her hands making various gestures. The sense of place here, obviously, is her own physicality, isolated during the pandemic at home, and they are intentionally made with quotidian materials (in this case cheap acrylic yarn from Walmart).

Surrounding the room with the rug of her body is a 100-foot band that uses a weaving algorithm that never repeats a pattern. It is her way of channeling Anni Albers’ rug weaving and Josef Albers’ color juxtapositions in his famous “Homage to the Square” paintings.

The wildness of colors and the variation in Brandt’s modes of expression (which also involve beads, bobbin-laced orange safety flagging tape creating an open-hand gesture, handprinted fabric and her mother’s handkerchiefs, bearing cyanotype images of Brandt’s hand, that are quilted onto a bedspread) make the show a fun visual feast.

But the fastidious obsessiveness of these techniques belies a kind of imposed order also hinted at in “Off Grid” at Space. At a gallery talk, Brandt allowed that she “gets kind of sad if I’m not working on something.” She said she puts on NPR and listens to the day’s horrible news. That felt like a verification of the power of working different materials within a grid, which can be a coping mechanism, a way of ordering a reality that is ever more erratic and unwieldy.

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland. He can be reached at: jorge@jsarango.com