OFLUXO

In Chadwick Rantanen’s exhibition of photographic demontages and laser-cut plywood sculptures, he modifies conventional cultural symbols to suggest other versions of a perceived reality.

In an ongoing series of photographs, Rantanen constructs a world from collected images of the cross. Draw-ing from every corner of the internet,–fashion, commercial products, stock photography, political stunts, craft projects, sightings and spiritual memes–Rantanen removes the cruciform’s transom or horizontal beam, reduc-ing it to a simple column. The subtle alterations are surgical, involving the extraction of elements followed by a process of seamless grafting and stitching to restore the photograph’s cohesiveness. The new symbol, reduced to a line, often nearly disappears within the image. Unburdened by symbolic gravity, the manipulated photos still convey a mystical aesthetic. For example, in one work what appears to be a finger swipe through condensation on a window reveals a spectrum of color from burnt orange to white to a heavenly blue. Another photo portrays an array of hand-decorated plastic strips on a table, a class art project hastily captured with a flash by a school-teacher. By showing the textures and environs of religiosity, Rantanen also draws focus to the labor that often supports symbolic power.

Informed by Rantanen’s upbringing inside the community of Jehovah’s Witnesses, the project reenvisions the religious organization’s rejection of the cross and other icons. Although the Witnesses claim that the crucifixion occurred on a stake or crux simplex, they don’t try to replace the cross with a symbol of their own but instead attempt to invert its meaning into a symbol of what they are not. In response, Rantanen’s altered photographs depict a world centered around a ‘weak symbol,’ one difficult to distinguish from other common forms, creating the potential for unexpected and uncertain spiritual encounters.

Alongside the photographs are a series of laser-cut, plywood sculptures, in which the artist extracts staircase designs from various dollhouses, toys, tabletop games and crafts. Rantanen assembles these into a morphology, cataloging the vernacular particular to these fantasy constructions. Their building methodology is unified by simple joinery. The pieces evoke architectural models, but the staircases are not just scaled-down renderings. For example, a cylindrical baluster on a staircase might translate as a simplified 2D silhouette cut out: an im-pression, a sign. Relegated to the realm of tchotchkes and play, the staircases convey only traces of the built world. Displayed together, they describe a medium of emulation, transition and transcendence.