Field Projects is pleased to present Between Shape and Schema, curated by Lauren Hirshfield, which brings together painting, drawing, collage, and shaped wood sculpture by Jana Marie Cariddi, Srishti Dass, and Rochelle Voyles. The three artists share a visual language of construction and an interest in architecture and infrastructure, both as physical structures and as metaphors for how things are organized, connected, and held together. Architecture here is less a subject than a method; the artists borrow the logic of how something is built, such as how a room is framed, how a mark repeats, or how a part meets a whole, and apply it to invented worlds that sit between the grown and the manufactured. Surfaces are built slowly by hand or assembled from parts, and the edge of each work is as deliberate as what it contains. Throughout the exhibition each artist reframes the systems she investigates, whether civic, spiritual, bodily, or imagined, into composite compositions of her own invention.
Structure appears here at several scales. Dass’s paintings and drawings move between rigid, calculated compositions and soft, painterly passages that loosen the architecture she builds. Her current work grew out of a desire to imagine an environment without people, a speculative place that doubles as a personal refuge. Vaulted corridors, thresholds, and glowing orbs stack into symmetrical interiors that read as both mystical interiors and drafting diagrams, and their crisp, planar forms show a clear affinity with hard-edge abstraction.
Voyles approaches collage as both a craft and a language. Textile templates are transformed into looping, curved works that become their own symbology akin to glyphs, and, alongside a newer “shrapnel” series informed by collage cast-offs, offer the duality of composite making in these abstract constructions. Their imagery layered onto the pieces in this show are abundantly architectural, shaping in turn the final structure as much as it fills it, piling into impossible, imagined cityscapes.
Cariddi’s works, while similarly fragmented in composition, reflect much more the infrastructure of the body. Her shaped panels join airbrushed gradients, resin, and milled edges into jointed, pipe-like assemblies that hover between the anatomical and the mechanical. The selection of small graphite drawings build a vocabulary of soft-edged symbols that behave like cells, ribs, and branches. Her handling of paint, color, and composition mirrors Dass’s in pointing to hard-edge abstraction as well as a deep lineage to the Chicago Imagists, and her mixed-media surfaces are as invested in the formal questions of abstract painting as in the curiosity of constructed shape.
Across all three practices, an order emerges that can be observed but not quite translated, inviting viewers to fall into the nooks, gaps, and crevices of the artists’ edifices. Here, a system is not rigid but porous, a place where bodies, buildings, and images trade parts. Moving from built environments to bodily systems and back again, the works treat the moment when a structure starts to behave like an organism as a place to linger rather than resolve.
