Commonwealth & Council presents Goldilocks, a group exhibition hosted by Gallery Spatium of sculpture, works on paper and site-specific installation by Erich Bollmann, Enrique Castrejon, Kelly Cline, Michael Decker and Maryrose Cobarrubias Mendoza.

Goldilocks, named for a neighborhood bakery near the headquarters of Commonwealth & Council in Historical Filipinotown, brings together the work of artists who share transformational approaches to representation and abstraction, dramatizing the dissensus between varying ways of seeing.

Erich Bollmann presents “faulty representations” of familiar objects and collective memory through sculptures and drawings. Economical material gestures are complicated by their situation; paper maché wishbones deflate the potential gravity of a scene of skeletal remains by suggesting that there is Enough for the Both of Us; a color pencil drawing depicts Icarus on the horizon past a partially eaten cherry pie.

Enrique Castrejon alludes to cartography and mathematics in his quantitative obfuscation of found images and empty spaces. Castrejon focuses on a hyper-obsessive practice of physically mapping various found materials, choosing points and measuring distances and angles relating to those points, ultimately obscuring the image with a mass of quantitative data. The locus of concern is shifted from the content of the material to the practice of his abstraction, referencing the meditative quality of process and the anxiety of teleology.

Kelly Cline creates an idiosyncratic visual language through the processes of collecting, fracturing, affecting and rebuilding. Working primarily with rescued cast-off detritus fostered over a period of time (fragments of drywall, wood, melamine panels), Cline cuts the materials apart and forcibly fits the pieces together, creating a dialogue between her intervening relationship with the materials and the character of their found aesthetics. For Goldilocks, Cline presents a site-specific piece in the drywall of the gallery.

Michael Decker’s sculptures and photographs are activated by the intuitive juxtaposition of found objects. Decker’s work highlights the agency of “things” and the subjectivity of perception by drawing attention to the mythologies created when seemingly disparate elements are brought together. In Young Girl (2011), a weathered piece of wood is disturbingly anthropomorphized by the application of fabric panels cut from a child’s doll; a sculpture made from a vanity mirror, brass tension rod and lamp stand is titled with a quote from Adorno.

Maryrose Cobarrubias Mendoza’s sculptures are often minimal handmade reductions of mass-produced, culturally-charged objects. Toy soldiers are at once sexualized and emasculated by the scraping off of their fatigues while virgin white miniaturized punching bags assume an unlikely delicacy. Mendoza’s painstaking attention to detail demands careful consideration of even the humblest subjects.