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Exhibition Title: ETERNAL - Jason Hackett and Wade MacDonald Dates: 03/01/20 - 06/01/20 Venue: Shockoe Artspace, Richmond, VA Exhibition Statement: Eternal brings together new works from Richmond artist Jason Hackett and Alabama-based artist Wade Folger MacDonald. Often when people think and talk about that which is eternal, it tends to come up as something synonymous with infinity, meaning numerically endless, with no beginning or end. I tend to think about that which is eternal as being beyond time to the point of numberless. Eternality seems to be much more of a qualitative reality replete with ontological implications. This qualitative state can draw us out of ourselves or into ourselves to the point we feel as though time has gone quickly or slowly, but perhaps at this threshold, we glimpse a sense of something beyond us. This exhibition presents wall pieces and sculptures from both artists that possess shifting qualitative states. Through the past, present, and possibly “future” tools of making, Hackett’s work brings us into close contact with a superseding sense of our mortality, our life, and the desire for things that last. Digital interventions obfuscate the human touch. Gold driftwood as both metaphor and an object to value nudge in us a view of our fragile place in our circumstances as well as the persistent desire for hope and permanent value. Wade’s work brings our bodies into a merged space of architecture and vessel-ness with flickers of aesthetic contextualization, verging on structural collapse and reemergence at various rates as wall pieces “gather” as multi-material chrome bodies that look salvaged out of sci-fi wreckage. Taken together, the vast material intent and exploration in both artists’ works crosses disciplines and ideas. The common thread running throughout the work is the way we come into contact with materials and formations that demand more time than what is numerically possible and yet point us to a sense of there being something more, something provoking us into repeated enriched consideration of each work and what exists just beyond the ontic reach of each. -Ryan Lauterio Photos: Jason Hackett |