“Uncertain Scaffolding” by Aaron Kagan Putt at Echo Contemporary Art. (Photo courtesy of Leia Genis)
It is almost as if something exploded. Bits of steel wire support panes of colored resin ranging in form from curvilinear to rectilinear, enclosed to splayed out — these fragments are skeletal structures as porous as breezeways. With such thin elements comprising them, each composition feels nearly weightless, like a balloon of air that’s batted around in a game.
This near immateriality is intentional, described by artist Aaron Kagan Putt in the text for his solo exhibition Light Gathers at the Edge at Echo Contemporary Art. “I create works that operate at the intersection of the tangible and the ineffable,” the text reads.
These armatures feel nascent, as if some tinkerer had picked up each, begun to work, then abandoned them for another. They are almost as much about the negative space as the positive — what could fill the gap between two supports? What might have been there before being emptied out? The airiness of each composition fills them with potentiality, leaving one to wonder what might be possible here. And yet, it is precisely this lack of specificity that is also this exhibition’s greatest weakness, setting the viewer adrift when what I sought most was a north star.
Writhe and Twist (2025) is one of the more compositionally simple pieces in the exhibition. An S-shaped pane of transparent orange resin floats far from the wall, its form reminiscent of a calligraphic mark. Encased by steel wire, three short stems of wire protrude near the top of the curve like eyelashes. It is supported by a steel armature holding the composition nearly a foot from the supporting wall, a distance which casts a deep shadow, as if the mirrored form is yet another part of the composition.
As read in the exhibition’s wall text, the artist is “inspired by art historian Dan Byrne-Smith’s claim that ‘the importance of simple acts of imagining things as other than they seem cannot be overstated.’” The motivation for Putt is thus clear — a re-imagination of the familiar.
While Writhe and Twist does have some elements that feel vaguely recognizable, there is no definition within the piece that leads me to understand what is being re-interpreted. Even the title of the piece seems to describe the methods of abstracting the familiar rather than indicating an origin point. But I feel it need not be this way.
I am thinking of Constantin Brancusi’s sculpture Bird in Space (1923). The artwork is a minimalist abstraction composed, seemingly, of only two shapes: a truncated vertical cone and an oblong almond shape — not too dissimilar from Writhe and Twist — featuring a slight angular taper near its zenith. The artwork, while completely devoid of recognizable imagery and forms, is tethered to something familiar by virtue of the artwork’s title. This simple title gives us a prompt, a framing for which to consider the minimalist form before us. I believe a similar strategy for Putt could be used to great effect.
One of my favorite artworks in this exhibition is Subtle Motion (2025). Easy to miss, this artwork is mounted in the corner of one of the bay windows in the gallery. The small sculpture, which resembles a magnifying glass, curves up from the corner to a bulbous piece of clear resin, within which is a preserved insect. As compared to Twist and Writhe, this artwork feels like it has an origin point — both with the preserved insect and the view of the outdoors toward which it gazes. These two referents ground the artwork in a satisfying way: The interaction provides a framing to operate within and a lens through which to interpret the means of abstraction enacted through the rest of the artwork.
It feels counterintuitive to argue that some abstract art would be better with more grounding, but I see the need for a means of way-finding. Mystifying and disorienting viewers can be tactics gainfully implemented in art, but Putt’s abstractions currently provide so little information as to make them inaccessible — wherein lies the issue. With some more insight, we could be splendidly lost in the architecture of thinking engendered by Putt’s practice.
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Leia Genis is a trans artist and writer currently based in Atlanta. Her writing has been published in Hyperallergic, Frieze, Burnaway, Art Papers and Number: Inc. Genis is a graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design and is also an avid cyclist with a competition history at the national level.
