On the Threshold of Grids and Ghosts

In Jane Sangerman’s layered abstractions, the eye must learn to trespass. Each work is an architectural riddle, hinged vertically, fractured horizontally, where netting and fencing, spray and print, rust and repetition form a composite language of compression and release.

Her surfaces speak the dialect of entropy and order: painted grids flicker like afterimages, graffiti pulses from buried layers, and circular apertures suggest wounds, memories, or ghosted machinery. The top register often hovers in abstraction: cosmic, luminous, metaphysical; while below, the textures collapse into urban decay: oxidized metal, peeling paint, scarred cement. The visual seam between above and below isn’t merely formal, it is philosophical. It is the site where permanence erodes and perception fractures.

Sangerman’s recent installation continues this dialectic in three dimensions. Here, fencing becomes sculpture, transparency becomes strategy, and castoff matter becomes witness. Her Bushwick surroundings aren’t merely referenced, they’re absorbed. The city leaks into the studio, becomes pigment, form, substrate.

To move through her work is to oscillate between reverence and ruin. As she writes: “I revere these storied environs and grieve the changes that are surely to come.” Her compositions are elegies to the present: ferocious in color, fragile in construction, and alert to the porous boundaries between self, structure, and space.