The Arts Center at Duck Creek in Springs presents “Jeff Tranchell: A-Side,” a site-specific winter exhibition in the windows of the John Little Barn at Historic Duck Creek Farm. The windows are on view from Dawn to Dusk, while the grounds are open to the public and will be lit from 4 to 9 PM every night for optimal enjoyment.
Jeffrey Tranchell’s “A-Side” is a glass and wood panel screen made specifically for the windows of the Art Center at Duck Creek. The work borrows from the code-determined vocabulary of protective barriers found around New York City construction sites. Here, Tranchell has produced a wall of OSB composite board complete with diamond-shaped observation windows as a means of concealment but veers towards a kind of shambolic craftsman aesthetic. Thin green stain sensitizes the details of the oriented strand board, with the finished product alluding to a more cottage-core aesthetic appropriate to its set and setting.
The artist then fills the plunge cut voids with stained glass sun catchers in a fabricated culmination of his Sun Catcher series: The unsanctioned and ill-fated stained glass works that anonymously replaced the quotidian plexiglass panes adorning the actual construction walls throughout Brooklyn and Queens, highlighting the barrier window’s in a way one construction worker called “an artwork.”
Exhibiting in galleries as well as producing commissioned works for public and private spaces, Tranchell currently favors the medium of stained glass for its ability to play both sides of various fences, at times occupying the focal point of conceptual consideration and at other times flying under the radar as a merely elevated functional trade. Even in this instance, viewable only from the outside of the space, the work performs as a billboard and a partition to the actual exhibition space, keeping the outside world at bay.
The show runs through March 31.