The Brooklyn Rail

In addition to providing an afterlife and a way to order one’s morals, religious faith suggests a very satisfying use for mathematics, as a way in which the overwhelming chaos of life can be sorted, measured, and weighed. What chance has a rich man of entering the kingdom of God? How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? That such questions are answerable in the eyes of Christianity provides an immense feeling of comfort to believers, even if the answers themselves are implausible or esoteric. In a mathematically divine universe, human error (and free will) becomes wonderfully superfluous: however we may suffer from our own mistakes in the moment, we can rest easy knowing it’s part of a bigger equation.

In her New York debut at David Peter Francis, the artist R. Jamin has created a dynamic show around this idea, with all the comforts that accompany a medieval sense of proportion. For Temperance, the windows of David Pagliarulo’s two-room gallery on East Broadway have been blacked out, as if turning away from the all-too-modern world outside. The best starting point for the exhibition is in the center of the far room, where Jamin’s Reliquary I (2023), the largest work in the show, stands on a white pedestal. A spindly construction of wedges and spires, it somehow evokes both a pulpit and a pew, evincing a kind of erstwhile religiosity that will be obvious even to those who did not grow up attending church. That Jamin lists “termite droppings” as a component in addition to walnut wood might be a pointed joke, implying that the vaguely Catholic object is being eaten from the inside. If so, it’s the one wry exception to an otherwise solemn, even tenderly earnest show—Jamin’s sole indulgence in barbed irony.

Barbs of other kinds, however, proliferate throughout the space. Across several sculptures, Jamin has whittled steel dowels into dully glinting points which she uses to hang and balance her assemblages of walnut, feather, and glass. On one wall, lattice S-shaped hooks hoist fine silver chains, balancing a pendulum that dangles menacingly over a velvet cushion and a small pile of metal shavings. Elsewhere, in a back corner, a dove feather seems to rest on a sharply tapered rod, as if weighing a soul that’s about to enter heaven. These spears recur in several large graphite drawings placed throughout the rooms—both the most eye-catching and enduring part of the show. Hung low enough to encourage prostration, Jamin’s drawing MacCruiskeen's Spear (2024) references a character in the Flann O’Brien novel The Third Policeman who sharpens a lance to the point of infinity, so the first few inches of blade are invisible.

In The Tunguska Event (2024), a graphite drawing that looks like a William Blake allegory run through a Xerox machine, Jamin offers an imaginative take on the mysterious 1908 explosion that flattened 80 million trees in central Siberia, and whose origins have never been definitively determined. In an age when fewer people turn to religion to address their unanswerable questions, quantum physics has begun to fill the void. It’s been speculated that the event, which must surely have seemed like an act of divine wrath to those who witnessed it, was the result of a “micro black hole,” a hypothetical microcosm first suggested by Steven Hawking. According to quantum mechanics, our collision with this small speck of darkness “would have easily penetrated the earth in an almost straight line … triggering underwater and atmospheric shock waves and drawing off a thin, geyser-like column of water as it flew into space.” Jamin visualizes this outlandish theory in spiritually resplendent detail through a graphite drawing depicting the world bisected by a line of pure sharpness. Above it, a mushroom cloud has been shaded so carefully that it looks at first glance like the tree of life.

For a show about divine geometry, Jamin’s graphite works are lovingly imperfect. They appear to have been made over many, many hours in a very quiet room—probably one with the curtains drawn. Diminutive fortifications appear on the horizons of several of her works, a clear nod to pre-Renaissance portraiture. The artist eschews a ruler or compass when making her drawings, and while her linework is careful and clearly painstaking, the overall effect is modest, almost homespun. Trying to depict phenomena of incomprehensible precision with only one’s hands is its own act of faith. In surrendering her talents to a subject that exceeds depiction, Jamin taps into a very old artistic practice that is rooted in service and humility: supplication to the sublime.