Sean Talley at Jancar Jones Gallery

Kenneth Baker
San Francisco Chronicle
September 12, 2009

The sculpture and drawings of Sean Talley fit smartly into the tiny Jancar Jones Gallery (note its correlatively abbreviated business hours). Individually, the pieces echo the key aspect of the show in total: a pervasive wavering between fragments and wholes.

The tight space and soaking light encourage a reading of the show as a single installation work. Three fiberboard panels along one wall, each with a pristine plaster slab of different dimensions attached, read now as a single work, now as a series or even as excerpts of a series. These possible readings correspond to—and so, objectify—different ways of thinking about the things at hand.

All but one of Talley's pieces effect this lucid correspondence between angle of approach and the aspect under which the things appear. Every encounter with the material world abounds with such ambiguities, but only special circumstances, such as Talley and Jancar Jones have contrived, invite us to contemplate them. Visitors who remember the heyday of minimalism may give a sigh of nostalgia here. The high style of the 1960s has had surprisingly slight influence on Bay Area art.

Talley regrettably gives the game away by tagging his works with titles such as "Cube Without One Corner" (2009) and "Rectangle Without One Corner" (2009) that tilt the viewer's perception too far one way.

The formal clarity he maintains so carefully matters because it permits us to sense the mute decision-making that rustles at the heart of vision.

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