Shoshannah White and Andrea Caretto join forces on Ghost Keepers
Ghost Keepers, a two-person show at RULE Gallery opened on December 13 and is scheduled to continue until February 7. Caretto is a sculptor whose works on display are vertical pillars, three molded from plaster and three from concrete.
White is a photographer who primarily works through the medium of photograms, and is displaying an ongoing body of work which, thrillingly, involves cooperation with scientists and their cutting-edge research facilities to study what stratifications of ice can tell us about our world (such as the National Ice Corp Foundation in Lakewood Colorado, where White works with the materials directly). Immediately, the connection is clear. We are ushered into a realm of the imagination, where the immensity of deep time is activated through the motif of geological stratification. However, to access the largesse of the respective works themselves, the dutiful viewer may be obliged to ponder the differences, see this connection as a point of departure rather than one of arrival.
Photograms are a form of direct photography; the French Surrealist Man Ray was a principal innovator in the early 20th century. It involves placing the object directly on the emulsive surface and capturing the impression left. Photography without a camera: a kind of magic. White has upped the ante from the age of Man Ray. Her photograms document exact sections of ice core specimens in situ within the facilities where they are scientifically studied. The delicate striations on her photograms expertly take advantage of the affordances of the device.
Here the sensuality of art and reality of science exist in a kind of awesomely intimidating inextricability. An explicit exemplar, which could be recommended as a starting point, is Ice Core Sample, South Pole Ice Core with Volcanic Ash: Depths 1317.01 – 1318.03, 2023. The title itself is evidence that White is a hard-core literalist. It is a title anchored by facts. Five photograms are assembled vertically, and each captures a section of the ice core at 1:1 scale. But is White only a hard-core literalist? I think not! The work appears to my eye as a partnership between the principles of hard-core literalism and the spirit of hard-core romanticism. Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich extended his oeuvre of the romantic landscape to a series of iceberg landscapes, much loved by artists. Hard not to imagine there is a winking nod to that here. In works like Big Trail Lake Water #4 and Big Trail Lake Water #5, White shifts the photogram object to lake water at sites where permafrost is being studied at a facility in Fairbanks, Alaska. Here, White’s literalism is playfully obscure, as the photogram is not only a record of the lake water as artifact, but a kind of romantic intervention into the object of study; the artist disturbs the surface of the water so that bubbles appear.
Caretto’s sculptures are also informed by geological stratification. I was fortunate enough to ask her about the land’s influence on her. She lives in Colorado, and often drives by a distinct land form known colloquially as “The Hogback.” In order to access the largesse of Caretto’s work, I recommend a mindset shift. Here the motif of geological stratification is primarily a point of departure. When I spoke to her, the artist admitted that the tragic dimension of Alzheimer’s runs through her family line and informed the gravitas of this body of work. As I studied them, I started to imagine the works as a kind of anti-memory palace. (The concept of memory palace as a device was popularized as a methodology to strengthen and spatialize memories one might not be able to retain otherwise.)
Don’t be deceived by the delicate pastel palette shared across all her sculptures. All is not safe here; mementos, found objects, cherished belongings are all revealed at risk to the crushing weight of time. Within her sculpture Perfection, an image of a family game, itself titled “Perfection,” peaks through one layer deposit, while mangled bits of Barbie doll parts poke out a couple layers above. I kept thinking about Christopher Nolan’s 2010 blockbuster Inception, where memories can be both recovered and planted! Caretto’s pillars as structural motifs appear to function as a counter-theme to the relentless chaos of memory: strength.
MSA hosts celebratory group show
In May 2025, MSA celebrated its 25th anniversary. The project is the brainchild of painter and printmaker Melinda Beeman. The nonprofit MSA gallery space on San Antonio Street has been linked to its fundraising program to provide art education to Marfa Elementary School. Thirty percent of proceeds from gallery sales support the funding of Sites Studio, its art education program. The remaining 70% of sales go directly to artists.
MSA Teacher’s Group Show is installed on the west wall: Chelsea Quinlan, Marcela Rodriguez, Suzanne McLeod, and Katy Baldock. On the opposing wall is a painting by Melinda Beeman herself titled Dawn Grasses. Hard not to see the care Beeman takes to model light falling on desert grasses as linked to the overall care she has taken to sustain this important educational program. Quinlan employs the automotive material “Bondo”—used for automotive repair—to build up complexly congealing impasto surfaces. To study her paintings is to become enmeshed in its otherworldly details, their crevices and fractal micro-macro crystallizations.
Four paintings are on view. Of the two flanking works, one is circular, and the other is irregularly so. Rodriguez’s works employ panel structures from comics as a formal device. The dividing panel enframements become sites of action and morphological transformation. Thousand Panel Spider depicts two panels, with a symmetrical bisecting division. Once the line passes from the first panel to the second, a complex radial pattern emerges, invoking a sense of explosion, or a transportive hole, while remaining ambiguous.
McLeod offers up a study of the local water tower as a kind of abstract sign of Marfa in three works, cementing their meme-like quality, which state directly in each: Marfa.
Baldock’s ceramic samples are scaled at domino size. To me, the culminating effect is one of Bauhaus-esque study artifacts. Maybe for a larger speculative design taxonomic project? Three sets of four artifacts are roughly the same size. The background the forms are adhered to is exacting in its coloration and surface quality, as are the wooden frames.
Curtis Bordenave depends on sunny days
The ongoing project of Curtis Bordenave III depends on sunny days. Given those necessary conditions, he sets up a table of small paintings across from the Hotel St. George. For this tabletop project, he exclusively presents paintings of tomatoes. Legendary conceptual artist David Hammons famously sold rows of snowballs on a city sidewalk. Bordenave brings an adjacently peculiar enigmatic X factor to his own set-up. He recently exhibited a serial grid of variantly drawn travelers, each holding an iconic walking stick with the bundle behind the back associated with the term “hobo,” a term Bordenave himself declines to use. His exhibition Bright Tommorrows Out Of Dark Yesterdays, works of charcoal on paper, at Mesa Pictures closed mid-November.
Club Nowhere: Artist flea markets, and curated rooms for the holiday
Additionally, Alex Kamelhair and Colin Waters are artists utilizing the table as a means of display, through Club Nowhere’s artist flea market programming. Waters is a ceramicist, recently working with ceramic ware. One of such ceramic forms that may catch your eye is derived formally in part from standard plastic crates but hybridized with a pattern design of round holes he just happened to notice on a chair seat at the laundromat in Alpine in 2021.
Kamelhair is an artist metalsmith, whose works at Club Nowhere are all forged. Material ranges from steel, to some copper iron and stainless steel. Their surface qualities invoke a terrestrial sense of the power and density of the various metals, at the scale of the hand, and their functional uses within that scale.
When asked about Club Nowhere’s program, gallery director Chris Ramming’s rejoinder comes fast. He asserts it is more of an “anti-program program.” In addition to hosting music shows and an artist flea market throughout December, Ramming has orchestrated a Christmas exhibit he annually assembles from his own collection.
Ramming has been iterating this project in several different incarnations. From 2018 to 2023, Casita Bar on San Antonio Street was the site of its creative incubation. After Casita Bar closed in 2023, the exhibit became transient again, migrating to a friend’s space in El Paso. Finally, it reached an apotheosis at the current address at 401 South Highland Street when it donned a new moniker, House of Christmas for the holiday. During an era when many people don’t know how they feel about Christmas, and seem to lose the muscle memory required to animate any holiday at all, Ramming went full tilt-boogie with his carefully curated rooms. One room was dedicated to holiday films, another room to a carousel of nostalgia-infused photographic slides. The pervasive feeling was guttural, you reside in the realm of someone else’s real memories. In a third room, a collection of holiday photos from different recognizable sites in Marfa was on view.
The architecture office reopens
Lastly, 2025 is also significant for the reopening in September of Donald Judd’s Architecture Office, following the fire that tragically set back its renovation in 2021. The first-floor display rationale takes its cue from Judd’s own official purpose for the space as an architectural design showroom from 1991-1994.
Amongst the range of artifacts and design objects, I was drawn to tables designed by Judd on display, which could be “slipped together” like a sort of puzzle (from the Slip Together series). I found one recurring motif across several tables to be highly suggestive topologically. Two of the tables’ horizontal surface planes run parallel, modeling Judd’s perennial exploration of three-dimensional depth of field with this lucidly horizontal bent, which delimits a spatial compartment below the upper surface of the table-tops. Such perceptual joys Judd’s work often invokes, but are also subtly at work here, transforming the viewer’s awareness of the designed world in a way that brings to mind Möbius strips, or better yet, those diagrammatic cubes modeled to suggest a fifth dimension, analogically if not literally: tessaracts! At the center of the room, one may notice two marvelous wooden bottles, whose structures echoes the playful utility of the surrounding tables. The story goes that the wooden bottle’s design was a creative product of a conversation between Judd and local master printmaker Robert Arber. (Arber’s downtown studio storefront is co-run with his spouse, printmaker Valerie Arber, and remains open to the public by appointment only.) Together, Judd and Arber imagined a bottle that would multiply its functionality; when assembled with others of its kind the utility of the eccentric wooden bottle transforms into that of a building block! I would encourage the reader to make merry by visiting any of these extraordinary works. And, why not? Undergo your own marvelous morphogenesis in the new year.