The Chazan Gallery at Wheeler is pleased to present the show Fraudulent Applications of Projection featuring the work by Alex Wenstrup and Nathan Borradaile Wright, from January 30 - March 11, 2025. ​

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Exhibition Statement

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In mapping, projection refers to a broad set of transformations by which the curved surface of the Earth is represented in two-dimensional space. In alchemy, the same term denotes both the process and the physical reagent by which lesser metals could be transmuted into higher forms. Both usages derive from a spatial evocation: the act of projecting, of throwing forward; a dynamic action crossing between parallel but intersecting spaces. Mapping projection, however, invokes a rigid geometric framework (sometimes figurative, sometimes literal) that restrains the dynamic character of the object it represents. These practices order space, establishing mathematical principles and social procedures by which our protean world can be made static and fungible, in the process excising the errant, uncertain, and unknown. But, despite these efforts, everyday life is still unpredictable; meaning remains fugitive, and the substance of our world continues in its endless process of transformation, throwing us continually forward into the new. Fraudulent Applications of Projection features works that interrogate the range of visual tools and material practices that situate an individual in space, anchor them to a landscape, and orient them within the material world. The exhibition explores the tension between static, rectilinear representations of space (maps, photographs, satellite images) and the messier, disordered continuum of experience that characterizes daily life (fragments, impressions, material traces). Spanning disparate scales and incorporating multiple media—part panorama, part kaleidoscope—Fraudulent Applications of Projection invites viewers into a playground of cartographic abstractions, through which a vibrant, if sometimes fractious and fictitious, world can be glimpsed.

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Alex Wenstrup is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice draws from architecture, photography, and glass. Alex considers the spaces around him and, through the use of projective techniques, responds to a space’s inherent qualities, like its depth, light, and ordering lines. These observations culminate in a range of objects from intimate atmospheric images viewed through layers of cracked, bubbly glass to lines drawn across the surfaces of a room. Wenstrup’s multiplanar works challenge our perceptions of space, time, and transparency, requiring further observation to uncover their true forms. As these assemblages shift, distort, and step, they consider Alex Wenstrup, AuthaGraph Projection, 2024 (Glass) feelings of presence and the unraveling of a deteriorating environment. Wenstrup grew up in the suburbs of Chicago. He received a Bachelor’s in Architecture from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a Master’s in Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design. While at RISD, he developed a close relationship with the Glass Department which has continued to influence his outlook on art and architecture today. He has presented work both nationally and internationally, most recently in Prague at the 2023 Stanislav Libensky Exhibition. Alex currently lives and works in Providence, RI.

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Nathan Borradaile Wright regards the landscape as a living document too large to be seen and too tangled to be understood, so that everyday life becomes an exercise in collecting, collating, and combining its fragments into some sort of improvised map, while knowing that this product can only ever be provisional, indenite, and incomplete. His work rehearses this process of observation and experimental synthesis, navigating boundaries between material, historical, and phenomenological domains, and often intersects with themes of collective memory and ecological representation. Wright’s interest lies in culture’s labor to subsume the material world within systems of discursive abstraction, and the futility of such efforts when met with that world’s endless transformation, in which we are ourselves so deeply entangled. Wright is an interdisciplinary artist based in Rhode Island. He received his MFA in Experimental and Documentary Art from Duke University, and a BFA in Glass from the Rhode Island School of Design. He has taught sculpture, video, and photography at various colleges including Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He currently works as a fabricator for Keer Glass Foundry. He has been the recipient of a Creative Glass Fellowship at Wheaton Arts and Culture Center and exhibited his work across the country.