KATHERINE MCMAHON
Habitat is a weekly series that visits with artists in their workspaces.
This week’s studio: Jesse Greenberg, South Slope, Brooklyn. “I’m always trying to find new ways to make mistakes,” Jesse Greenberg said in his basement studio, surrounded by a number of the psychedelically colored resin sculptures that have become his trademark as well as all sorts of scrap material. In the past two years, Greenberg has made a point of hanging onto these “mistakes” so that he can reuse them in other projects.
How do his shimmering, almost-liquid-looking works come about? “Very often I have a piece in my mind that I want to create, and through that process of trying to make it, I come up with something really different,” he said. Chance surprises can help. “In some cases,” he continued, “I make something exactly how I imagine it and it’s somewhat underwhelming.”
Greenberg counts his time as a sculpture student at RISD as a formative technical learning experience. “When I first applied to college, I assumed I’d study Industrial or Product Design,” he said. “When I got there and started to experiment, I realized that I liked sculpture more because it was even more open ended and I didn’t have to make things that had a strict function.” Greenberg’s knowledge of materials has evolved a lot since then, but he continues to try to push the limits of his chosen mediums, which frequently include urethane, resin, and silicone. He normally orders his materials straight from the supplier, or sometimes The Complete Sculptor, which he says is the only place in New York that sells every single variety of the materials he works with.
Greenberg recently had a solo show at Derek Eller Gallery in New York and is currently focusing on producing ambitious, larger-scale sculptures. Below, Greenberg takes us around his Brooklyn workspace.
ALL PHOTOS: KATHERINE MCMAHON
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"This one is titled Heal 2. It is resin, pigment, and nylon string. There are two processes, one is by pouring resin into a tray of plastic dust, and then the other is pouring resin into a membrane supported by a scaffold of strings."
"This is a detail of Body Scan 9, which is resin, pigment, foam."
"This is a longer-term project. I'm building this network of these forms from molding runoff material."
"This is the backside of a piece that I edited out of my recent show at Derek Eller at the last minute. It's basically a surveillance diptych. One piece has a wifi camera and the other piece has a screen that's a feed from the other piece... I withheld from showing it because I felt I needed the right conditions or right space for it."
"This is an unfinished piece. I don't know what I want to do with it yet. I'm trying to figure out how it can be displayed, whether it's hanging on a wall or slumping like this. It's like a slab of whale skin."
“After mixing resin colors, I throw these things away into a bucket, and it's created this slowly growing sculpture."
"This is my mixing station."
"These are really old, but they're the beginning of so much for me. At the time, I was obsessed with making these things that people would want to touch. I 3-D printed, molded, and cast thousands of these. After a while I found that I wasn't really gaining anything by letting people touch the art. I find it's better for people to want to touch rather then let them touch. Now I give them away to studio visitors."
"I've been saving this sawdust material, which looks like confetti. Sometimes I get really finicky and try to separate the white from the pink."
"This is a grouping of custom silicone mold parts. Or tools for making my work."
"Most of this area is excess material, failed or unfinished works. Whenever I do something that's more experimental, usually I apply it somehow to a concept later. In the last two years or so I've really started holding on to all my excess materials which I use for filler material later on."