‘Jeff Tranchell: A-Side’ at Duck Creek

The Arts Center at Duck Creek is currently presenting “Jeff Tranchell: A-Side,” a site-specific winter exhibition in the windows of the John Little Barn at historic Duck Creek Farm. Now through March 31, the windows are on view from dawn to dusk, while the grounds are open to the public, and will be lit from 4 to 9 p.m. every night for optimal enjoyment. Optimal viewing is at dusk.

“Jeffrey Tranchell: A-Side,” is a glass and wood panel screen made specifically for the windows of the Art Center at Duck Creek. The work borrows from the code-determined vocabulary of protective barriers found around New York City construction sites. Here, Tranchell has produced a wall of OSB composite board complete with diamond-shaped observation windows as a means of concealment, but veers towards a kind of shambolic craftsman aesthetic. Thin green stain sensitizes the details of the oriented strand board, with the finished product alluding to a more cottage core aesthetic appropriate to its set and setting.

The artist then fills the plunge cut voids with stained glass sun catchers, in a fabricated culmination of his Sun Catcher series, the unsanctioned and ill-fated stained glass works which anonymously replaced the quotidian Plexiglas panes adorning the actual construction walls throughout Brooklyn and Queens, highlighting the barrier windows in a way one construction worker called “an artwork.”

Exhibiting in galleries as well as producing commissioned works for public and private spaces, Tranchell currently favors the medium of stained glass for its ability to play both sides of various fences, at times occupying the focal point of conceptual consideration and at other times flying under the radar as a merely elevated functional trade. Even in this instance — viewable only from the outside of the space — the work performs both as a billboard as well as a partition to the actual exhibition space, keeping the outside world at bay.

Jeff Tranchell lives and works in Detroit, Michigan and has exhibited with Detroit galleries Elysia Bowery and Reyes Finn and at Halsey McKay Gallery in East Hampton. He also features the work of other artists and performers at Lavender Country Detroit, a sprawling community garden lavender patch adjacent to his studio.

The Arts Center at Duck Creek is located at 127 Squaw Road in East Hampton. For details, visit duckcreekarts.org.