Wade Kramm’s Dotted Lines Transform Space, Challenge Perception

Kramm’s work is deceptively simple. The artist has been pushing the boundaries of installation since earning an MFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design, developing an intriguing hybrid of Minimalism and Geometric Abstraction. Here, he’s employed primarily tape: black electrical tape, by the looks of it, the kind you’d buy at a hardware store for home improvement projects. The artist uses this everyday material to block off imaginary planes and forms, creating the illusion of shapes and edges in what is otherwise an empty room. In some areas, lines run “off the page,” so to speak, challenging spatial perception—black wooden poles extend Kramm’s dotted outlines into space, beyond the hard edges of the gallery’s floors and walls. The effect is like walking into a life-size blue-print.

In the absence of captions or further explanations from the artist, the viewer is left to muse on what the shapes could be: a table, a doorway, a fireplace, or perhaps something altogether less concrete, like a shadow or reflection. “I am not creating any new forms,” Kramm has said, “only revealing the space that is already there…my work strives to compete with architecture, not by adding more materials, but rather through our perception of the space.”