Long Leash

Astor Weeks is pleased to present Long Leash, a solo exhibition by Kyle Clairmont Jacques. Through fabric-based sculpture and a two-channel video installation, familiar forms such as the tent, the kite, and the sail appear as vessels for place and desire. These forms are defined less by structure than by the implication of wind, gravity, tension, and containment. Whether designed to catch air or keep it out, they reveal how freedom and protection can share the same architecture. Long Leash considers home as something carried, assembled, and disassembled, drawing tension between autonomy and restraint. The exhibition opens with a collaborative two-channel video by Jacques and filmmaker Alex LaLiberte, projected full-bleed onto adjacent walls in the gallery’s antechamber. Filmed on a downtown Manhattan rooftop, the work centers on a taut string held by a body that moves in and out of frame. The kite itself is never shown. Instead, the video focuses on effort and orientation, asking whether control resides in the hand holding the line or in the unseen force pulling against it. Entering the main gallery, a billowing red-and-white striped canopy stretches across the architecture. Titled Opera of the Puppets, the work was inspired by a marionette theater Jacques visited in Palermo, Italy, as well as from Empire and Campaign styles of the early nineteenth century; the interiors derived from battlefield tents and designed to be portable and quickly assembled. Opposite the canopy, three wall-mounted sculptures hang in a cascading, paused state. Constructed from waxed canvas and steel, they merge the logic of tents with the whimsy of kites. Held in place through gravity and tension, their vertical lines extend outward like sails, hovering between shelter and collapse. Kyle Clairmont Jacques (b. 1987, Fitchburg, MA; lives and works in New York) has developed a practice centred on space: the ephemeral, cosmic forces propelling one decision to the next, as much as the architectural space of items assembled, dismantled, and repositioned.