Contributed by Kate Sherman / On a freezing night earlier this month, I visited the opening of “Respawn,” Will Kaplan’s first solo show at D.D.D.D. gallery. The gallery recently traded its tight space in a Chinatown walk-up for a large, sweeping basement with a nook near the entrance, which houses Kaplan’s show. Five sizable works built primarily of wood are cleated to the walls and face the center of the room, where a provisional pedestal supports a clearly handbound notebook. Across the face of each wooden form, imagery sourced from printed matter is layered into dense collages. Kaplan’s vintage aesthetic held me back from apprehending the profusion of images present as a facsimile of our contemporary mediascape.
In Carry, I recognized the deeply saturated blues found only in magazine photos of a bygone era, printed with old-school (and superior) lithographic methods. In Isle, I saw styles of medical illustrations that could have been clipped from my grandma’s nursing textbooks in the 1980s. I immediately delighted in the familiar static crunch of images reproduced by mechanical means, spared the smooth, backlit sensory overload of a cluttered digital screen. Kaplan’s collages are materially inclusive: he draws, paints, traces, scrapes, hammers, and rips the surfaces, which reward his persistent manipulations by evading instant understanding and holding the viewer’s attention.
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Further dividends await in Kaplan’s notebook work, titled Sourcerrors. I flipped the pages of scratchy, toothy paper – strange for a typical notebook but just right for something between a sketchbook and a temporal sculpture – and found a tracing of a plastic piece that is glued to the front of Isle. This discovery attuned me to other physical objects that Kaplan has attached to wooden supports. A bisected drill, bits and bobs of tools, and, most viscerally, a screwdriver poised to pierce through a cyborg’s wrist. These interventions connect this series to the artist’s experience as a crate maker. Each piece of wood used is scavenged from a commercial production line.
I regarded the wooden supports, with their neat cuts and corners, as precious byproducts of another way of making. The deeply cleaved pieces of wood would clearly fail to meet the standards of any crate maker and now serve as perfectly imperfect foundations for Kaplan’s art. During my second visit to the show, I began to think of the diagonal cleaves of the refuse wood as the space between the picture plane and its support. This area is virtually empty, like the middle of a piece of corrugated cardboard, load-bearing but dimensionally distinct from both figure and ground. Viewed from the side, a piece of wood shows its cycles of growth. Space, in these works, is essentially stacked time.
Intentionally or not, Kaplan provided me with many such episodes of meaning unlocked. Overall, I realized that his boatload of seemingly random pictures are in fact circular narratives, packed with humor and wit. They poke fun at the human condition and play, perhaps a bit more seriously, with construction and destruction as eternal metaphors for life and rebirth.
“Will Kaplan: Respawn,” D.D.D.D. Gallery, 79 Leonard Street St., New York, NY. Through January 10, 2026.
About the author: Kate Sherman is a painter based in Brooklyn, NY. She has exhibited in various group exhibitions in New York City and Philadelphia. Sherman is currently pursuing her MFA at Hunter College.
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