Diving into the past to ground contemporary viewers in the ever-advancing here and now, the four artists in “Solid Projections” present a grouping of dubious memory objects—newly-minted souvenirs of moments alluded to rather than experienced. Beth Collar, Coleman Collins, Nevine Mahmoud and Jeffrey Stuker step into the role of revisionist historian in this exhibition that questions the lines between art and artifact, narrative history and fragile memory. Each artist’s work rebuts, ciphers or builds upon the meaning implicit within artifacts associated with antiquity, the recent past or timeless traditions, reminding us that history is just a story that we, as a culture, tell ourselves.

In the gallery’s namesake larder, or pantry in American dialect, Stuker’s Daphnis nerii  caterpillar, Grand Sud, Madagascar, 1991 (from the Botanist’s Satisfaction) (2023), lit from within, presents as both a traditional column and Stanley Kubrick’s futuristic monolith. When viewed from above, this work tells the fictional story, placed in the 1990s, of a daphnis nerii caterpillar who, when feeding on a flowerless vinca (periwinkle), produces excrement that is harvested for making cytotoxic drugs used in chemotherapy for cancer. Stuker, who underwent chemotherapy in the early 1990s, uses computer renderings to wax poetic on his unlikely would-be hero. Collins, likewise, references technology to draw the past into the present. The artist’s wall-mounted relief, Untitled (Niche) (2023), evokes both ancient stone slabs with inscriptions and the generic background of most modeling software. Emblazoned with the bust of Nefertiti, this work builds on both the initial artifact and Isa Genzken’s 2012 sculpture series of the Egyptian queen to imbue this iconography with yet another layer of meaning.

Mahmoud’s Anima (2023), an earless fawn’s head brought forth from Turkish Sivec marble and placed upon brushed aluminum, seems to float outside of time, in that it contributes to the tradition of marble sculpture that can be traced back to ancient Cyprus and the origins of Western culture. Mahmoud’s Vanity head (2023), a floral and phallic form that was 3D printed in Accura Xtreme White 200 resin, sits close by on an identical brushed aluminum shelf. One is hard-pressed to find the difference in the finished quality of Anima’s ancient medium and Vanity head’s new printing technology. Collar’s sculptures in plaster also straddle recorded time and verge into the speculative space of prehistoric studies. Molded in the form of the Liver of Piacenza, a 5,000-year-old bronze artifact and the most notable record of haruspicy, Salvation and Silence (both 2022) are adorned with pencil drawings of pterosaurs, asserting that all readings of times past—heavily supported by material proof or not—are, to some extent, conjectures.

Existing in our contemporary moment can, at times, feel like hopelessly staring into Jorge Luis Borges’ infinite library—as if everything to be written or created already has been, thus nullifying our present. What Borges offers as solace—and what the artists in “Solid Projections” also champion—is the power inherent in both annals and archive longevity. Combining precursory narratives with subtle indicators of the early 2020s, each artist advances a lineage and conveys history anew.