Plural Is a Kite that Goes Left or Right

Jonathan Ehrenberg has been drawing us to the edge of the lamp light for more than two decades. Beginning with films of peopled, hand-made worlds; through digital-sculptural tweeners; and arriving here with clay sculptures of common objects ringed by small paintings. Through all these permutations Ehrenberg's work has never lost the sense that there is a dramaturg furiously writing in the wings. And indeed wings feel an apt metaphor as here too, aside the proscenium, there is much that is just out of view. In fact, this presentation of objects and paintings is merely the hummock (a word I just learned) of the iceberg the artist has been crystalizing over the elongated years since the pandemic, and his concurrent entry into fatherhood. It is not the first public showing of this work but the first of this particular constellation rife with sympathies and buzzy with the feeling of thinking. I am drifting a little here but that is in part because my initial iceberg metaphor is only one way to describe the waterline in Ehrenberg's work. Another, leaning more heavily on psychoanalysis, might posit that this waterline is the very boundary of sublimation; of language and form attempting to account for the vast deterritorialized depths. Coming to Ehrenberg's work is something like returning to consciousness or a recovery from amnesia. It is tied up in a familiarity that also involves recalling the names of things. What year is it? When was my mother born? How many times have we met? All the time doing one's best to keep front of mind just what it is like to be plural. —Lucas Blalock