Kahlil Robert Irving, Maddie Butler, Jedediah Caesar

Material is often understood as stable, yet across contemporary practice, it increasingly functions otherwise; materials carry within them traces of time, systems of circulation, or conditions of perception. 

Kahlil Robert Irving, Jedediah Caesar, and Maddie Butler operate within this unstable terrain -  images, objects, and substances are shaped by processes that resist permanence. Across their respective practices, material remains unresolved, layered, mediated, and reconfigured, holding together multiple temporalities and contexts simultaneously.

Irving’s work unfolds through sculpture, printmaking, and photography; his objects operate as records for the extended process of making. His sculptures are built through multiple firings and the sequential application of decals, enamel, and lusters, with each firing stage addressing the surface in its entirety. The resulting objects in this presentation are flat containers of time, accreting gestures made of ceramic looking like asphalt, and objects fixed within or on top of a surface that resists reversal. Across both two- and three-dimensions in these works, images oscillate between legibility and dissolution. Representational forms, architectural fragments, and urban textures emerge at a distance and fragment upon closer view, destabilized by the material conditions' ability to perform mimicry; the objects sit in a liminal space of representation.

Caesar’s sculptures emerge through the aggregation of materials that carry distinct and often conflicting associations. Metal powders such as nickel, copper, and aluminum are combined with spices such as turmeric, cinnamon, and chili, then bound in polyurethane resin to form dense composite structures. These materials function simultaneously as commodities, industrial resources, and cultural signifiers, while Caesar’s attention to adulteration foregrounds material transformation at the chemical level. Conceived as vessels, these forms suggest cargo-like objects, compacted and transportable, in which heterogeneous materials are held in suspension.

His stone eyes operate through a similar logic of displacement and reduction. Modeled on stone inlays from ancient sculptures, these eyes are presented as discrete forms, recalling both their removal from original figures and their circulation as votive or protective objects. As they shift between specificity and abstraction, their morphology persists even as context is lost.

Butler approaches material through technological mediation, examining how systems of imaging and communication structure intimacy and perception. Working with discarded electronics, personal digital archives, and optical components, her practice situates subjectivity as produced through layered systems rather than internally fixed. In the tapestry works, Lighthouse 1 and Lighthouse 2, Fresnel lenses are stitched into large-scale surfaces that capture and fracture their environment, producing images in continuous flux. In The Bad Mirror, a rear projection television is divided into reflection and void; a creation of a simultaneous encounter with the self and its absence. In smaller assemblages, photographic fragments and digital traces are embedded within the material remains of the technologies that once stored them, rendering memory contingent and mediated. Through reflection, refraction, and recursive imaging akin to a mise-en-abyme, Butler constructs visual structures that fold back onto themselves, positioning the viewer within a feedback loop between subject and apparatus.

Material is active, contingent, and continuously redefined through use, circulation, and perception. Meaning emerges through processes that unfold over time, across systems, and between bodies together in a space where transformation remains ongoing and incomplete.