The work in Blind Spot is lush and austere, ornamental and minimal, restrained and exuberant, historically resonant and absolutely current, engaging and exclusory, accessible and intellectually challenging, self-conscious and inevitable. These tensions are in no way accidental. They function as complements that trigger consideration and reflection, even as the objects themselves enchant and gratify. They are in fact, structural artifacts of a restless intellectual inquiry that embraces scholarly research as both methodology and subject, synthesizing new ideas out of traditional forms of adornment.

Kivarkis' work is characterized by multiple discursive dichotomies. An older piece that has been published widely consists of a perforated, enameled cone projecting from the surface of a shield-like, decorative form. There is a deliberate awkwardness in this brooch that plays the lacey detail of the cone and emblematic formality of its base against its slightly ungainly proportions and thickly anonymous, white surface. Pieces that follow exploit this quality of the enamel (succeeded in later work by more ductile white paint) to mask detail and neutralize content.

However, the forms in Blind Spot, all brooches, aren't awkward. They are superbly crafted, beautifully proportioned constructions of elaborate, decorative elements. those parts are partially obscured, incomplete, inverted and transposed in unpredictable, but persuasive configurations. Their painted 'whiteness' takes on a more specific character...still neutralizing, but almost as self-contained documentation; a drawing of the three-dimensional object it coats. The primary tensions are between the expectations raised by Kivarkis' use of familiar jewelry devices, in conversation with the calculated coolness and precision of her modifications.

While Anya Kivarkis is a committed maker, her avid attention to the nuances of materials and process are more than matched by her passion for ideas. She consumesand processes books, articles, exhibitions, theoretical discourse and the current themes of popular culture, bringing them into the work with extraordinary speed. The work is in turn physical evidence of a synthesis of that research within her practice, informed by and displaying all of the subtle variations of those multiple influences and discussions.

The idea of a 'blind spot' was initially suggested to Kivarkis in a lecture by Hal Foster. The premise connected with her own inquiry into perception – particularly the effects of revelation and concealment, of what is known or expected leading (in both her process and objects) to the unexpected and to some new understanding of an initial assumption. In Vision and Visuality , Foster speaks of, "how we see, how we are able, allowed, or made to see," and, "how we see this seeing or the unseen therein." What is interesting about Kivarkis' response to these ideas is that she explores the theoretical territory in many different directions, without demonstrating or confining it. Rather, she adds to the conversation, in a physical dimension that embodies Foster's call to "thicken modern vision, to insist on its physiological substrate".

The Blind Spot brooches share a number of formal tropes, particularly referencing Baroque ornamentation (and its Victorian revival) that indicate their conceptual connectedness. However, each piece is significantly individual in details that demonstrate Kivarkis' singular awareness of all aspects of her subject. A blank, white oval that is initially a clean, 'modern' shape is partially and suggestively textured with a pattern of Victorian lace, that move it instantly back in time. The ends of looping, draped, white lines emerge from a lower edge that tilts forward and away from the body. Viewed from the side, the profile of the piece is a wedge of ribbony substructure that supports the forward angle of the front plane. Turned completely over, the piece is a dense bed of white, Baroque bows with equally white, expressionless, marquis-shaped 'stones' implanted here and there in the chilly, crisp, somehow exuberant mass. In another piece the front panel is a convex, decorative silhouette, marked with emerging facets that hint at the field of set stones concealed behind it. It's whiteness is modulated, gradating from glossy to matte across the surface. The ice-blue stones concealed within are themselves only partially visible, and only from the side, their questionable value confounded by our inability to really see and assess them.

There are clues to the conversations that most engage her own work in that of contemporaries she admires. Kivarkis is intrigued by Myra Mimlitsch-Gray's evolving examinations of process and function, and in the work of Ted Noten and Karl Fritsch related to jewelry and thinking about luxury. She shares certain interests in the language of fashion and adornment with Vera Siemund, but is lately thinking most about the photographs of Thomas Demand, who reconstructs familiar scenes as featureless cardboard models, photographing the model as the final stage of his work. Germano Celant, writing about Demand's work at Fondazione Prada in Milan, says that, "the most attractive and intriguing characteristic is the dazzling yet fleeting way he overturns our own definition of reality. The more this reality appears to present itself in a simple and innocuous manner, the more it creates perceptual short-circuits upon careful observation of the represented scene."

Kivarkis understands that the familiar format of brooch is an ideal vehicle for her investigation into 'overturning definitions'. A brooch's orientation is frontal and graphic, and it is expected to relate to the body in that way, at a particular scale, as ornamentation and jewel. She thinks a lot about how one 'enters' one of her pieces visually, and a sidelong look is only one of several strategies she deploys to expand her subject. Pieces in the series reveal themselves from multiple angles and views, incorporate various attributes of the brooch, the jewel, and the decorative in unexpected positions, with surprising allusions to drawing, painting and other contemporary works. The brooch delivers itself as an image, but also as a history and a sign, connected as much to critiques of art and material culture, economics, power and fashion as it is to craft and decoration. Kivarkis is working with a notion that Jacqueline Rose reflects in her essay Sexuality and Vision ; that, "our previous history is not the petrified block of a single visual space since, looked at obliquely, it can always be seen to contain its moment of unease."

Kivarkis' methodology in this part of the process assumes an archival dimension, seeking "to make historical information, often lost or displaced, physically present". Contemporary archival artworks are not outcomes of a passive process of appropriation however. As Hal Foster notes in An Archival Impulse , "These artists often aim to fashion distracted viewers into engaged discussants." The artist interprets and reconsiders the material in the context of installation, film or other organizations of information. When Kivarkis investigates the visual evidence of Baroque jewelry, she considers it in terms of an experience, for maker, wearer and audience. Much of the archival material that is available to her comes from period paintings and the drawn records of craftspeople, since the objects themselves were often melted down and re-worked into new reflections of quick-changing fashion – in itself another interesting element of the subject. Kivarkis intervenes in this history, "re-gathering" it by working from a drawn or painted rendering, an interpretation of the object, constructing a new piece that is a re-interpretation of the first. In this way she activates ""gaps" in contemporary practice – gaps that might be converted to beginnings" and "offers a critical perspective on both the original and its repetitions" (Foster).

Kivarkis' process is scrupulously exact. She duplicates every flourish of the rendering, excepting those areas that cannot be deciphered and translated from a sketch, or are hidden by the clothing, cheek or chin of a jewel-wearing portrait's subject. At this point, rather than assuming an 'interpretive' role, imagining an appropriate composition or completing the form in some personal manner, she moves the piece precipitously into an analytical present. She interrupts our view with a concise, minimalist box, or excises a clean negative space into the object that describes the contours of the visual source's recorded obstruction. She mediates the shock of this divergence through thoughtful negotiations of scale and form, and by referring again to the original, treating the fabricated metal objects themselves as drawings, binding two dimensional pattern and three dimensional structure with a flat white ground, or a mechanical, 'industrial' surface that cancels difference. Judiciously drawn lines emerge from the white ground from time to time, to describe facets of stones that are painted metal fabrications of stones, or to indicate the rise of a shape that requires attention. The pieces hover in a perceptual space between drawing and "thing", past and present. They are constructed renderings of historical records, filtered through an informed contemporary sensibility–not the real thing, but an analytically driven interpretation of the interpretive that determines its own fresh reality. Kivarkis is Interested in how she will mis-read the original, how she will re-construct it, even when she is not aware of doing so.

Kivarkis' concern with the Baroque also demonstrates a desire to understand all of the potentials of an oblique view. She is curious about perspective, not so much Karel Van Mander's "landscape, into which the eyes can plunge", described in An Entrance for the Eyes , but rather the "impulse to consider several sides of every issue, or both simple and complex meanings of every statement", that was essential to Renaissance thinking, refined and codified in the Baroque. Kivarkis' formal process assimilates these ideas as both maker and scholar. On a torso that pivots away into the picture plane a symmetrical brooch is rendered in perspectival asymmetry, and she transfers that silhouette intact to her newly considered object. While Kivarkis honors the 17th Century "impulse", the work is also a product of 21st Century access to a range of information and ideas unavailable to any previous generation. She seems hyper-aware of her responsibility to both. The brooches reveal an intricate and always evolving understanding of her sources. Layers of time and form, implications of luxury and ornamentation, the significance of fashion and its relationship to economics, colonialism and power are ideas that inform each piece; as is the mystique of jewelry, representing as it often does, that which is out of reach, objects of desire and images of success.

Kivarkis speaks of her work related to cultures of luxury in recession; political and economic realities related to opulent ornamentation. She points to Victorian colonialism and Baroque monarchical oppression as examples of social structures that played out their inevitable consequences and produced artifacts exemplifying elite cultures of extravagance and excess. Many of the objects she has researched are staid, Victorian industrial revivals of improvisational Baroque forms. However, what interests her are the relationships between the two histories, and to current conditions of fashion, which has in fact, recently resurrected the shapes, motifs, fabrics and adornment of the 17th and 19th centuries.

This last issue, how to approach current modes of adornment and display as a legitimate subject for post-modern investigation, is an area in which Kivarkis struggles with links that will illuminate her subject. She is cautious in managing those that are too close – that risk becoming fashion itself, if she is not attentive to the depth and breadth of her inquiry. Her self-assigned task is to pull from the immediate aesthetic without aligning with it. Recent work moves even further into the unfolding present, positing a relationship between the jewelry borrowed and worn by celebrities, ubiquitously pictured in red carpet photographs, and aristocratic portraiture from the past. Her au courant cultural source is Hollywood, exemplifying contemporary patronage, consuming luxury and fashion at its own breakneck pace.

Kivarkis has begun to mine these topical images for 'jewels', that are unexamined reconstructions of the historical objects she understands so well. She is curious about the connections and differences between portrait painters and paparazzi. She physically rebuilds each faceted stone as a metal object, treating the incompleteness and idiosyncratic view of the photographic image with precisely the same attention to accurate translation that informs the historically representational work.

The speculative capacity of this new work is in the context of her ongoing practice, in its potential to expose an enduring aesthetic, resurrected over time to express the values of the moment – ideal representations of privilege and power. Observations on differences–time, historical sequence, and the nuances of the dominant culture are contained in the beautifully crafted, visually compelling details of each piece. All is study, all is research; her objects, remnants of an inquiry–into ideas, images and hands-on investigation. Happily, the 'blind spot' is packed with fascinating information.