“Jacket and Shadow and Jacket and Shadow and Jacket and Shadow,” Jasper Marsalis’ exhibition at Kristina Kite Gallery, directs me to hear its entirety with my body. The visitor is tasked with arriving and making contact with his process of transcoding a glitch-like quality of life with apparitional impact. Through the importance of having various forms, Marsalis mashes up sculptures, screens, paintings and more, offering a memoir matrix anchored in disappearance and emergence while delivering a sense of plurality and reckoning. It’s as if the installation itself is a fissure, a counter-monument and a web. He arranges compositions of dissonance into consonances that simultaneously suggest the possibility of the body—or his body—without fully representing it. Wood and stick forms are jammed into and protrude out of bowling balls. There is a large self-portrait, clothed ghosts backboned by tripods, a laptop with a circuit map, stacked and strapped speakers and paintings with a techno-focused color palette, all networked in a style that is not nostalgic but does suggest a personal account in transformation. Marsalis, a storyteller who mediates between many mediums, finds the conditions for showcasing something remnant and past while also reconstructing a world for memories to announce itself. Instead of pointing to how these memories may have been produced in the first place, the exhibition considers how to recast a shadow into a subject that is not diminished.

Kristina Kite Gallery
3400 W Washington Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA
On view through November 4, 2023