Scott Olson and Jerry Birchfield exhibited by Cleveland Museum of Art at Transformer Station

About the Artist

Jerry Birchfield’s practice revolves around the question of how images emulate or subvert the sources from which they stem from. Through complex photographic and sculptural processes, his works go through various stages of transformation, from surrogate to self-reference. The making of meaning is synonymous with the search for the beginning and the end.

“Debris, leftovers, the aftermath of other efforts, materials only partially identifiable––like the scene after an accident or disaster, only too clean for that, too controlled. And not the kind of unidentifiable that happens in real life after the car crash or flood, not the kind with real loved ones and family. This is the kind that happens on a primetime drama––the kind where nothing graphic is ever shown or seen, nothing vulgar, and if it is, it is theatrical enough that we know it isn’t real, it couldn’t be, not like this. It is too clean because it is contained. We can see its edges, we can see where it ends.

This un-identification deals in senses, or things already known. Specificity without. . . . It doesn’t matter that we don’t have more, that we don’t know. Broken pieces of wood and dust and dirt don’t have much more to offer anyway. Here they are the filler, the stand-in, and the placeholder. They are the articulation of their representation, an acknowledgment of what they do now rather than what they used to be. To know more about their past is both pointless and beside the point.”

- Jerry Birchfield