Urban fossils

My daughter stopped me the other day as we walked to the neighborhood video store. “Look, Mom,” my 8-year-old exclaimed, “it’s a leaf in the sidewalk!” Sure enough … a gingko leaf had embedded itself into the freshly poured concrete of the sidewalk and created a perfect impression of itself there.

“It’s an urban fossil,” I offered.

'Urban Fossil #91' by Corey Jefferson

Synchronicity would have it that a couple of days later I would visit J. Martin Gallery in Fountain Square, in which the exhibit of Megan and Corey Jefferson’s work is on display, and lo and behold: more urban fossils. While Corey’s found-object and manipulated-material sculptures are officially named “Urban Fossils,” they are of a more conceptual nature — and yet combinations, too, of nature’s expressions and the built world.

Art is archeological: An artist captures some element of the world around her and preserves it with an interpretation or a more literal translation. The archeological objects we find are also interpreted, but by the vagaries of wind, sand and time. Much of today’s contemporary art has evolved to be more ephemeral in its construction — witness installation art, performance art, even video art, to a certain extent, as technology changes.

Megan and Corey Jefferson, husband and wife, moved to Indianapolis for Corey’s ceramics teaching position. The couple’s exhibit, Industrial Abstractions, reflects their musings and riffs on the notion of industry — its detritus, its beauty, its complexity. We need it, but its destruction and deterioration are not eye and environment friendly. The Jeffersons’ interpretations of this, their archeological musings, speak to the notion of our collective industrial self from a greater distance: Megan’s paintings are loose abstractions of linear forms, early modernist in feel, but not revelatory. The artist’s pastels have a depth of artistic feeling that is almost elusive in her oils; but perhaps that is the point.

Corey’s three-dimensional abstractions, on the other hand, are just as elusive and familiar, with occasional pieces — like Megan’s pastels — that speak to a deeper place. “Industrial Crush” is a case in point: A “crushed” tube is accordion-like on its pedestal, an elevated steel caterpillar that is equal parts hard and soft. Curiously, Megan’s art is hard and soft, too — that’s the paradox of our world. A leaf, a naturally beautiful, soft form, is hardened into its own likeness … an accident of man and nature. Art, too, is a paradoxical combination of intention and accident.

Industrial Abstractions, paintings by Megan Jefferson and sculptures by Corey Jefferson, is on view through July 19 at J. Martin Gallery, 874 Virginia Ave., 916-2874. Call for information and hours.