In Jeffrey’s second solo show at Culture Object, a significant shift has manifested; the artist’s first embrace of color is both shocking and rational. It is rational because the artist’s reliable focus is the systematic exploration of process and form, color was sure to enter eventually, and it is eminently logical that he would do so with a body of work that deconstructs the form as well. The shock stems from a clear precedent of denying, or at best, severely restricting color to tightly prescribed and limited applications; indeed, for years one could safely assume Jeffrey’s work existed in an explicitly black and white universe. Aggregates is evidence of the artist re-examining his assumptions and challenging his own conventions.

In this new work, foremost, one can no longer interpret the forms as vessels. In its place we have constructions made of discrete open and closed forms composed with a cubistic approach to an examination of sphere-derived shapes. Gone with this is the artist’s previously unviolated principle of classical totemic construction. With these new compositions, Jeffrey has frustrated the viewer’s ability to take in the form in full, from a single perspective. In doing so, the artist forcefully asserts the sculptural quality of the work and implicitly engages the dimension of time which is now required of the viewer to comprehend the form in the round. It is as if the artist’s Brancusi period has wildly given way to a Matisse inflected, Caro-like approach to color, pattern, and composition.

Unchanged is Jeffrey’s monk-like dedication to his meditative production process, his quest for discovery and understanding through the work. Evidence of this can still be seen upon careful observation of his intensely worked, burnished clay surfaces. Wrinkles and pock marks, subtle textural variations, striations and scumbles, each of which are laboriously and intentionally introduced to the surfaces which have been exactingly burnished to evoke an aged and ancient object. Fundamental forms also remain fixated on variations on spheres and their manipulated segments, each derived from wheel-thrown shapes.

As seductive as it is to lose ourselves in these stunning formal aesthetic developments, these fireworks are second fiddle to the larger strategy; the artist is demonstrating the pattern of discovery by performatively engaging in a systematic and symbolic evolutionary process. Jeffrey’s fixation began with the perfection and unity of the sphere, then on to the manipulation and eventual violation of the sphere, next the introduction of the open and the closed. Now, the immediacy of the totem gives way to the discovery of the multi-perspective form, a pivot from raw surface to ornamented surface, traced by pattern and enveloped by color. These are all in service of the differentiation and identification of binary forces, a dance of duality in search of understanding. Jeffrey’s path is not that of the fiery ingénue, it is the thoughtful exploration of the creative process embodied in objects that mark its own trajectory for posterity.

- Damon Crain