Things come together in unexpected ways in “Yesterday’s Code,” Derek Larson’s debut solo exhibition at Jack the Pelican.

Larson—after receiving his MFA in Sculpture from Yale in 2007—escaped to a log cabin in the woods of Vermont. Here, he dispenses with contemporary iconography to investigate the pastoral genre on a deeper level. There is still the fresh smell of pine from his newly cut trees. It’s not nature as such—pure, green and transcendental—so much as a scene of encounter with a forgotten way of life—or the site of a longing to connect with those who perhaps once connected.

It is no accident that the enigmatic plaster slabs popping here and there through the installation resemble in size and orientation the humble, bone-fragile tombstones of an old New England cemetery. In a sense, Larson is playing with ghosts.

There are parts of New England where time stops. Coming upon a centuries-old marker amidst the trees, it is not hard to connect with the spirit of its maker. They were often created by ordinary people expressing the dignity of their lives—and loves lost—in a quiet, soulfully sweet gravitas. Sadness and joy intermingle in the time-savored act of craft. Larson honors this anachronistic sensibility in homage. The work is to be taken slowly and contemplatively. A sacred, almost superstitious vibe clings to his softly-spoken symmetries… But he takes it further, finding in the ornamental flourishes of yesteryear permission to take flight into surprising whimsies of making. This is thoroughly his game; and the irrepressible presence of his personality throughout breaks the code wide open into an all-new field of play.

With moves that are by turns clunky and delicate, he concocts poetically mischievous sculptural hybrids. Formal and technical disjunctions, enigmatic and curious, lead us playfully through a forest of preciously-rendered moments and raw, naturalized gestures. Deadpan shifts of scale and incongruous pairings break down the governing syntax of tradition, in unobtrusively wicked innocence of the rules. The strange bedfellows he nestles in amongst his slow and deliberate renderings are formal moments at odds with their grace—turkey feathers spinning away atop a mirror, for example, or an orange tucked in behind a small, square, floriated plaster panel that protrudes from a plank.

Videos pop into the mix with sculptural force. One seen through a lacy cut-out screen of poppies, shows a young woman playing a pan flute with the toes of the artist. In another, projected through the top of a thicket of pines, fruit spins and blinks across the features of a man, like the juicy thoughts of a happy face. Strangely, it is all of a piece. —Of each of his insistently peculiar ensembles something larger of dynamic sculptural integrity and emotional charge emerges.

These are tuned winks, understated to rapport with the grave, bucolic echoes of the olden days. One is reminded of the way the Greeks saw mischief in the stars; and one imagines Larson in his studio far from the madding crowd, amusing himself in a private dialogue, as a shepherd, alone with his flock among the trees. He darts in and out (as in a game of hide-and-seek) between the reverential decorative motifs, disappearing in a precious, quasi-mystical trance encounter with nature and the past, only to resurface in a tease, as though to say, “Yoohoo, over here!” Indeed, rather than succumb to the doleful pangs of nostalgia for something lost, Larson haunts his idea of yesterday with a lively and boyishly sincere portrait of himself.