Jacob Lepp
Butterfly Kisses
26 February — 28 March 2026






















 When Jacob reached out to me on New Year’s Day about writing a text for his solo show, what made me understand the work conceptually was not the photos of works in progress, nor the written descriptions, but a personal anecdote. He described an old apartment he had lived in where he produced large graphite drawings by making rubbings on hand-made paper maquettes. When he paused to get up from his work, his graphite-covered fingers would subconsciously touch parts of the walls as he made his way to the bathroom or to the faucet for a glass of water. He noticed these residual markings on the walls accumulated over time, revealing the habitual, intuitive relationship between his body, space and time. 

This triangular relationship extends to Lepp’s site-specific installation. Informed by 19th-century upholstery practices and the domestic ambiguity of the gallery, Conditions. Butterfly Kisses addresses the gallery’s architecture in both its present and past iterations. Stretching along the gallery’s perimeter and covering the majority of the lower wall sections, Jacob’s upholstered fabric baseboard functions as a kind of “scaffolding.” In the center of the exhibition, a long upholstered sculpture stands approximately where a dividing wall formerly split the room, a ghost or echo of the space’s previous architectural feature. 

The baseboard, or skirting board, was introduced in 17th century European architecture. Its initial use was to protect walls from damage and to cover up gaps between the floorboards and the wall. As time went on, baseboards became decorative additions to interior design, augmenting a room with ornate plastered mouldings. While the baseboard primarily functioned to protect and to decorate, there was also an element of concealment at play. The baseboard is ultimately both addition and subtraction: an added element to a space that simultaneously hides imperfections in the wall and floor. 

The palimpsest also operates with a logic of addition and subtraction. Originally denoting ancient documents written on vellum that revealed traces of past script underneath newer text, the term’s applicability has broadened to philosophy, psychology and architectural studies. For Derrida, the palimpsest suggested a “non-contemporaneity” within the present; there is always a trace of the past, and even the future, within the present moment. Like an architectural palimpsest, Jacob’s installation moulds itself to every corner of the gallery, yet offers a new surface for future impressions. The central sculpture stands as a monument to the current divisions, highlighting the space’s multiple splittingss between art gallery, living room, and kitchen. Like the palimpsest, the installation performs as a two-faced Janus figure, with one face looking towards the past, while the other looks towards the future, representing reinvention and transformation. 

In Georges Perec’s 1974 book, Species of Spaces, he devotes a small section of his analysis and classification of the various parts of a nondescript apartment building to a “room without a use.” He tries to think of a purpose for this room and this leads to his mind wandering to thoughts of Borges’ labyrinthine stories, M.C. Escher prints and Magritte paintings. Ultimately, “language itself, seemingly, proved unsuited to describing this nothing, this void, as if we could only speak of what is full, useful and functional.” As he writes, it becomes apparent that while this room lacks a typical use within a home, it is a space within which one can dream, speculate and create. Like Perec’s room, Jacob’s installation is an enclosed space, a room within a room—one that allows visitors to contend with the architecture of the gallery itself. I imagine them scanning the baseboard trim with their eyes, following each section of the wall as if they were fingers eventually finding their way to the faucet. 

—Paula McLean 

1 Perec, Georges. Species of Spaces, 1974. Pp. 33

Jacob Lepp
Butterfly kisses, 2026­
Fabric, wallpaper glue, graphite
Dimensions variable

Jacob Lepp
A flock of three or more, 2026­
Wood frame, cotton, linen, wallpaper glue, wool flock
76.2 × 22.9 × 99.1 cm (30 x 9 x 39 in); 124.5 × 22.9 × 99.1 cm (49 x 9 x 39 in); 111.8 × 40.6 × 99.1 cm (44 x 16 x 39 in)