November 9 – December 21, 2024

What is a container for? For limiting, constraining, hiding away. For protecting, holding, affording safe passage. A body is a container. So is a frame. And with any container comes the specter/inevitability of spillage.

In “zero percent contained,” studio e’s exhibition of work by Polina Bertou and Jess Perlitz, the container is a site of limitation and possibility. Bertou’s large-scale paintings present figures who arc and contort themselves to fit within the canvas. Yet the palette’s bright yellows and greens, the figures’ curious, peaceful expressions convey the pleasure and wonder one can experience at the edges of their proprioceptive field. Figure and ground are porous, potentializing, indicative of the renewed relationship to the natural world Bertou found while creating this body of work.

Perlitz’s sculptures, on the other hand, expose and subvert the solidity of containers themselves. A 16-foot soft sculpture of an outstretched arm is stuffed with sand, suggesting that it might both hold back a flood and be the flood’s detritus. In another piece, bones hang from the ceiling like bleached-out bunches of bananas, both free of the body and suggesting its structure. While Perlitz’s other, rock-like sculptures suggest a greater sense of solidity, they are porous with holes, messy with dripped paint. Even what seems solid can spill.

Art that refuses containment, or contains curiously, shifts the space of the gallery it stands in, the visitors who approach it. Peer at Bertou’s bodies and feel yourself bending. Eye the hole in Perlitz’s “Faith Rocks” and discover a portal. Don’t fall, says this work, but allow for change.       —Sara Jaffe