In Snipe Hunt, George Jenne kills a mockingbird.

The artist, North Carolina born and bred, taunts us with the snippets of an elusive narrative, ducking and twirping through three cinematically-charged sculptural installations: a fallen tree fort, a smoldering backyard smoker, and a giant sacred pink closet. The Southern Gothic twist of Blue Velvet veers sharply left into the Baroque. But the charge of the confederate boy scout in these night woods- hiding in the periphery to observe his community’s tidy disfunction- is in the focused authority of pinks, greens and golds; the minimalist’s precision of disorienting scales and alignments; and the sure material integrity of a purely conjured world. The mastery of construction is stupendous, the balance of intimacy and alienation, dead-on.

Snipe hunting is a southern hazing ritual. The unsuspecting innocent is all he-haw to kill the bird (that for all practical purposes doesn’t exist) until he finds himself abandoned and alone in the middle of nowhere, like a perfect idiot. It is a bad, mean joke repeated through the generations.

But Jenne joins us for this Snipe Hunt and offers up a trick of his own, assiduously assembling meaning from the fragments of an elusive remembering.