no idea but in things

October 3–31, 2026
Opening Reception: October 3, 2-4pm

Objects rarely speak for themselves — and yet, somehow, they say the most. MONO PRACTICE is pleased to present no idea but in things, a two-person exhibition featuring sculptor Jim Condron and photographer Dean Kessmann. Working in entirely different media, both artists turn their attention to the overlooked material of everyday life, probing the space where realism gives way to abstraction, and where matter quietly accumulates meaning.

Jim Condron’s sculptures begin with objects that have outlived their original purpose — plastic, wood, and metal gathered over years, then bound together with paint and salvaged material into new, hybrid forms. What emerges is unexpectedly moving: something of our own humanity, still lingering in the things we’ve cast aside. Filtered through influences as far-ranging as Proto-Renaissance iconography and contemporary imagery, these recovered fragments are assembled into forms that hold humor, absurdity, and beauty all at once. The works in this exhibition are built from oil paint, plaster, plastic, terra cotta, fur, drywall, even crab claws and eggshells. Much of the story is told by the titles — So sweet and so cold, Home is a failed idea. These aren’t invented to explain the work; they’re fragments of language, lifted rather than written. They sit beside each piece less as caption than as another material in the composition — funny, unsettling, and oddly tender by turns.

Dean Kessmann photographs the city he calls home, letting his daily walking practice guide what he sees and how he sees it. Drawn from his ongoing series realism succumbing to abstraction or is it the other way around, the works trace a restless back-and-forth between recognizable subject matter and pure form, between poetic intuition and critical distance — in-between spaces that are both/and rather than either/or. For this exhibition, Kessmann dedicates one wall to a dense field of prints, displayed without the added barrier of frames and glass. Stripped of that layer, the texture of each print, the trace of the artist’s hand, and the marks of the printing process come through with an immediacy viewers can almost feel—carrying the raw, in-process intimacy of the studio straight into the gallery.

Across photography and sculpture, Kessmann and Condron arrive at a shared question: does meaning already reside in things, or does it only take shape the moment we choose to look?  no idea but in things offers no fixed answer — instead, it invites viewers to move between image and object, drawing their own conclusions from what remains.

About the Artists

Jim Condron lives and works in Baltimore, MD and Brooklyn, NY. He earned his MFA at the Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art and a BA in Art and English from Colby College, and also studied at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture. His work has been shown nationally and internationally in galleries and museums, and is held in corporate, university, public, and private collections. Condron is a recipient of grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation, and the Maryland State Arts Council, and has held residencies at the Art Cake Studio Program, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, the Heliker-LaHotan Foundation, and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Dean Kessmann is a Washington, DC–based photographer and Professor of Photography at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at The George Washington University. Working with cameras, scanners, camera-less darkroom processes, and screenshots, his photographs explore the relationship between abstraction and representation. His work is held in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Walker Art Center, The Phillips Collection, and the Orlando Museum of Art, and has been exhibited at venues including The Phillips Collection, the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, and the American University Museum. His exhibitions have been reviewed in Art Papers, The Washington Post, and Artforum, among other publications.

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