SEPTEMBER: word: JEFF LANE + JERAD WALKER : art: JAMES SANSING

My family and I own three James Sansing works acquired over the past few years. Our first piece is a large sculpture, an intricate assembly of cement, wire, metal braces, rubber, found objects and miniature models of boxes and doors, which took James well over a week to painstakingly install in our home. At first glance, the sculpture seems challenging with its darker tones, enormous size and jumble of broken pieces of cement and plaster. And yet, my wife and I, as well as visitors to our home, are drawn to it by the work’s intimate, enchanting detail and delicate beauty. We take great joy in living with James’ sculpture and have since acquired two smaller works.
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James works in varying media and dimensions, ranging from his larger installations, as previously shown at Ampersand and the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts, to smaller, handmade books, photographs, works on paper and, most recently, castings of concrete and graphite. Despite these physical differences, much of James’ art seems to share a common theme and inspiration, the sublime beauty of decay. The art is rich in images of things which existed in the moment of their viewing but carry the memory of their past: found objects, crumbling swimming pools, broken freeways, dangling cement, dust and most prevalent, imagery from the ruins of an abandoned home for troubled juvenile girls.
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When I acquired our first Sansing piece, I was unaware of the source of its inspiration in James’ experiences in late adolescence and his early 20’s visiting the ruins of that strangely beautiful place, which have since been torn down. James had risked arrest, regularly sneaking into the home as it stood derelict, surrounded by chain linked fence. In solitude and in the sanctuary of the home’s litter and decay, James found his own psychological harmony as well as a treasure trove of debris, broken fixtures and furniture and crushed boxes. Also in the refuse, Sansing found soiled, yet enchantingly beautiful journals, hand written by the counselors recounting the stories and lives of the troubled girl residents. These journals’ stained, moldy pages are the subjects of the two smaller Sansing works in our home.
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Living with Sansing's work, we feel unexpectantly at ease and comfortable, possibly approaching how James himself felt as he took refuge in the juvenile hall. I admire James’ success in experimenting with new and novel artistic formats yet consistently incorporating his memories to convey the subtle wonder of decay and the return of manmade objects to nature and dust.
JEFF LANE 2007

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I think of Rothko, the alienation he seemed to suffer, the light that was in him, awake in his paintings.
I think of carbon. The paintings are dark and shiny. Diamonds are made of carbon.
The paintings have holes in them.
There are holes in the dark, where one can see through to the white. The thought makes me happy. I see what you are saying…I am grateful to be here.
JARED WALKER 2007

SEPTEMBER: word: STEPHANIE BAKER + JERAD WALKER : art: DAVID FOUGHT

SOUNDFILE of
cut-ups inspired by
Untitled: 3( 5)wires and Untitled: 5 (3)sides by David
Fought

nose time
of small
of movable
strings from
STEPHANIE BAKER 2007

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with the object:
reflections on recent work by David Fought:

You don't look closely at the white wall, do you? You're not supposed to. David spent hours re-plastering it, sanding it, painting it. In essence, he sculpted the wall to become part of the piece, but an incidental part. You wouldn't notice 5 (3)wires in the same way if you noticed the bumps and imperfections in the wall. But now maybe you'll notice that no wall is perfectly straight although it seems to be. And the wires in the wall are not straight either even though your eye at first glance sees them that way– as clean, crisp, straight lines. Take a closer look at the walls in your own bedroom and observe the way they have dips, slants or bumps. Then walk around your neighborhood and observe closely to see how "straight" all the buildings appear, how they hold themselves up under their own crooked weight.

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I am listening to an R.E.M. song in our living room and I have the volume cranked way up so the walls throb and pulse and I am cleaning up the floor of our closet. I move a bag filled with miscellaneous items from the shelf to the floor and all of a sudden I hear a man's deep crackly voice overlapping the music like someone is talking in the adjoining hallway through an amplified source. The voice is familiar. I've heard this person somewhere before but the music from the living room is much too loud for me to discern what he says. Then I realize that I have inadvertently pushed the play button of my Microcassette Recorder that is in the bag I jostled from the shelf to the floor. The voice is David's. The moment where I heard my husband's voice in a new context replicates my experience of viewing his recent work. When I first enter the space of 3 (5)wires, I know there are shapes created by the bent wires and their shadows as I move around them and take them in at different angles, but I'm not sure what's familiar about them. They look the same. They are not the same. Is it a cityscape? I have to look again to understand the slight variation of repetition that is occurring among all three. Within each set of wires, one or two are placed one or two steps up or down in relation to the one next to it. And when I look and look again, a sense of movement begins like these are notations for a minimalist musical score or these are the leaps and lurches of an oscilloscope.

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When I look at 5 (3)sides, I am also struck by how these shapes are familiar but un-placeable. Each plaster vessel shape is determined by 3 waxed wire hoops, and they are sitting in a variety of poses. They are all from a family whose name I don't know, but I can imagine where they are from. A mathematician had an idea and brought her 2D model on paper to life as a 3D object. A theoretical physicist made a model to demonstrate a discovery about space, time and mass. An engineer made a cast of a part of a machine or some piping. A geomancer has cast some earth in divination and this is the resulting shape. It has aged on his shelf.

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David's materials are humble: coat hanger wire and a coarse, Fix-All® plaster. He doesn't purposefully obscure his process, but you have to look closely to see the scars and gouges on 3 (5)wires where you might have glanced and thought the wires to be perfectly straight. David's 'hand' is more readily apparent in the bumps and grooves of the standing sculptures. His process begins with collecting coat hangers with the largest gauge he can find. He hauls them to the beach, makes a fire in the middle of the day and burns them. He brings them home, oils them, takes them apart with pliers and then hammers them so they are not quite straight. He bends them into shapes. He holds them. From all that repetition, intimacy, time spent with the object, he discovers something about the object that is beyond an easy, clever explanation. He could get a machine shop to straighten them, or buy them pre-cut at Home Depot, but he prefers to spend time with them in an imperfect state. He has said that the process of being "with the object" is easily as important as the final work.

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The delight of discovery, finding things in the woods, in the creek, on the street. David has an intimate, visceral connection with found objects and materials. He sees things I do not. He makes beautiful what has been discarded. When I first met him, he drew my attention to all of the blackened, dried banana peels in the city gutters, which I had never noticed. Years ago, he collected crushed batteries of all sizes from city streets, wrapped them with thread and then installed them in a box like a bug collector might collect a series of moth cocoons. Once he took some pieces of a heavy truck tire and made a mold of their shape from lead. Then he put the treads on our wall. He has an amazing collection of balls found all over the world (we used to have a stack of Bocci balls next to our bed). He says he doesn't know why he does this, but he likes to live with these things.

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For David, readymade objects carry a previous meaning–a was-something or a did-something. Even paper was a "thing" before we cut it up or applied pigment to it. For work, David used to haul TV guides in a semi-truck from a manufacturer in the Bay Area to a distribution center in L.A. He thinks of the lives, past and present, of objects and things. He always wants to know where things come from. He once asked me, "Where do they make the backs of TV sets?"

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From my studio window where I write, I watch him work, arms coated with plaster. He starts with three hoops, places them in a box, fills the box with plaster, then carves all the plaster away except for the plaster directly in line with the hoops so there's a straight line from one hoop to the next. He works in a trance-like state. He doesn't measure, but intuitively feels the shape that emerges. He shaves and files with a variety of metal rasps. I am struck by how similar my process is to this when I trim and rasp the hooves of horses. I give them a pedicure using a sharp, flat file. They have bones instead of hoops, which dictate the basic, pleasing shapes of their feet–a cone, a triangle and a truncated dome. For David, the plaster is the flesh, the shadow that fills the space between.

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In Mr. Van Lannan's 4th grade class, David remembers that he was a cut-up, a class clown. But instead of sending him to the principal's office, this wise and discerning teacher made an artist out of a 9-year old. Mr. Van Lannan told David he could stay in the class and listen to whatever was happening, but he had to stay at his own work station (an area with tables, a sink and a collection of art supplies) and make whatever he wanted. David recalls making a paper mâché dog and layering it with different paints as he changed his mind about what color he wanted it to be.

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I open How to Write by Gertrude Stein and read a few sentences from the chapter entitled "Sentences":

They are many ways to think alike about sentences.
It is very little that they open and close.
Close it.
It is useful to be and useful. Used. Any word may be in a sentence. A word is a noun. What is a noun.
A noun

Gertrude Stein's writing is not opaque or abstruse, but object-like and suggestive of the underlying shapes and forms that make up thinking and writing. She uses grammar in the way David uses physical shapes to suggest something about how we construct meaning or what David calls "objecthood" from the basic materials of wires or words. "What" is a noun just as 3 (5)wires or 5 (3)sides are objects.

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David said about his work in a recent artist's statement: "these objects are what they are." One of David's favorite sayings from Stein is the following: "there is no such thing as repetition". John Cage (as quoted by David) says this in another way: "In Zen they say, 'if something is boring after two minutes, try it for four minutes. If it's still boring, try it for eight, sixteen, thirty-two, and so on.' Eventually one discovers it's not boring at all."

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David prints out photos of 3 (5)wires and 5 (3)sides onto 8.5x11 paper and I use an Exacto knife to cut out the shapes made by the cast shadows, or I cut out the shapes made between the wires of each piece, or I cut out the entire shape of the piece itself. I place the stencils on top of related texts: a journal entry written while sitting in his studio, a book on Wabi-Sabi, the collected writings of Donald Judd. The result is a series of pleasing cut-up poems made from words and letters and parts of words. Read aloud, the sounds are bits of a passing conversation. The vowel or consonant sound-bytes draw attention to the phrases, sentences or words that are more whole. Performed with another reader, these poems become sound sculptures. The text does something similar to what David's objects do: it draws attention to the meaning inherent in the shape.

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Here is my favorite paragraph that David wrote (from his Thesis):
In general, when we 'see,' we are not purposefully pointing our eyes and logically deciding what is there, even though that is what our eyes would have us think. The act of looking is no more manageable than are feelings of desire, and what we 'see' is at least as subjective as the act of falling in love. The simple materials that comprise these sculptures, placed in this particular manner, offer a puzzle to be solved by the viewer. The work both triggers and rewards scrutiny as one seeks sculptural resolution. As the viewer unpacks the puzzle, the objects become dissected into its disparate parts, only to be reconstructed into something un-nameable–all the result of looking. What we bring–how we see–is an important ingredient of this work. By making (and changing) decisions about what is actually there, the viewer consciously conspires with the object in a process of constructing phenomena.

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What can you find that astonishes you about objects in space? What pulses can you discern in the life of some object's trajectory in an adjoining universe? The machine pauses for a second and there is the shape. 5 (3)wires emerged over the course of a year as David experimented with variations of a coat hanger stuck into a white wall. When he saw Donald Judd's work in New York last fall he was inspired to ask these questions: Why do slight variations in a pattern call our attention back to what we are looking at? How does a series of slight variations in a group of wires/objects create space and sonic resonance?

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If I were an art critic, I would argue that David's work exhibits a tension between a modernist aesthetic (geometric, sharp, precise, clean, line-configured) and the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi (organic, dull, vague, crude, bowl-shaped); that is, the controlled light, cool shadows, and mathematical pattern of the straightened wires vs. the rough, distressed, one-of-kind plaster shapes. And yet elements of one are in the other. The dark, scarred wire that gives them their fundamental shapes goes through the same process–was burnt in the same fire and bears the same imperfections from the same hammer.

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3 (5)wires and 5 (3)sides are different solutions to the same question: what happens in the spaces in between differently shaped wires?

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The wires in the wall serve as lines AND as objects simultaneously. The shadows are lines indicating the 2-dimensional, flattened aspect of a 3-dimensional object (the wires). 3 (5)wires begs the question: Does the object draw the shadow or does the shadow draw the object? 5 (3)sides are 3-dimensional in the way the wires in the wall are not: they deal with gravity by sitting or leaning; they have mass and texture and surface with an inside, front side, and back side.

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The literary connection most obvious to me is that of the Haiku where the spare use of language creates the space for a moment of enlightenment. A something you realize or didn't see before.

boot crushed
on muddy trail
first bloom of spring


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David hums the notes and chords that are 3 (5)wires.
STEPHANIE BAKER 2007

Works Cited
Baker, Stephanie, unpublished haiku, 2007
Cage, John. I Have Nothing to Say and I Am Saying It. West Long Branch, NJ: Kultur, 1990.
Fought, David, Personal Interview, June 15, 2007.
Fought, David, non-Specific Objects (objects in-between), Master of Fine Arts Thesis, California College of the Arts, June 2004.
Judd, Donald, Complete Writings: 1959-1975, The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Nova Scotia, and New York University Press, New York, 1975.
Koren, Leonard, Wabi-Sabi for Artists, Designers, Poets & Philosophers, Stone Bridge Press, Berkeley, 1994.
Stein, Gertrude, How to Write, Dover Publications, New York, 1975


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I think of children, playing, outside on a playground.
Inside there are wires, connected to shadows.
We are like sundials. Our projections move, around with us, in light. We can’t escape them, but they seem to disappear when we allow them to be there.

There are rings on a shelf. We try them on like memories. Like a wedding ring, there seems to be another dimension beyond the linear. Somehow we know this, somewhere we remember.
JARED WALKER 2007

JUNE: word: MAURICE BLANCHOT : art : CESAR COFONE-DADAMO & MARION JANNOT : Endgame

Whoever is fascinated doesn't see, properly speaking, what he sees. Rather, it touches him in an immediate proximity ; it seizes and ceaselessly draws him close, even thought it leaves him absolutely at a distance. Fascination is fundamentally linked to neutral, impersonal presence, to the indeterminate They, the immense faceless someone. It bears the same relation, neutral and impersonal in itself, with that of seeing the eyeless and shapeless depth, the absence one sees for it is blinding.

MAURICE BLANCHOT
The Space of Literature

APRIL: word: LYDIA MATTHEWS + word : JUVENAL ACOSTA : art : STEVEN ELLIOTT

Angela Hennessy’s Forecast: Precipitation On the Way

Aeromancers (or more specifically “nephomancers”) are individuals who meditate on the clouds in order to divine the future. During the medieval era in Europe, they would practice their craft by summoning the ghosts of ancestors, requesting that they project spectral images from the future onto clouds so that their earth-bound brethren might know what would happen next. Nephomancers believe that the past, present and future form a telling continuum—so long as one is willing to study the heavens and trust in something that will perpetually transform and ultimately disappear

Perhaps we are all nephomancers to some degree or another. When we hear a radio voice announce today’s forecast as “partly cloudy,” our first instinct is to move to the bedroom window and glance up at the sky. Will those random and constantly changing vaporous shapes produce rain or burn away by the day’s end? Does their location and shade of grey promise physical relief or potential threat, and how will that vision shape our mood? Clouds can be disturbingly ambiguous or comforting in their predictability. Even if we no longer assume that ghosts have inscribed messages on them for our benefit, our mundane “readings” of clouds trigger a multitude of unconscious dreads and deep-seeded desires on a daily basis.

Likewise, Angela Hennessy’s recent “Partly Cloudy” installation at Ampersand International Arts evokes the psychological weight we inadvertently invest in those insubstantial, fantastic forms, reminding us that weather doubles as a psychic metaphor. She sets accumulated black strands against the gallery’s white walls to resemble a morose bank of clouds, and extends their threads downward to mimic sublime rain showers on a distant horizon.

Trained in traditional textile production, Hennessy literally “undoes” her own history as a maker when fabricating these clouds: she slowly and relentlessly unravels black velvet, shredding it so that its materiality is barely recognizable. The by-product of this mesmerizing, laborious process is loose black fuzz that resembles discarded nappy hair. Hennessy plays off the fact that black velvet—with its “uncanny” evocations of erogenous luxury— is also slang for African American women. She sweeps up these nappy piles from her studio floor to create “Hemisphere,” a perverse postcolonial simulation of a Victorian era paperweight. As cultural critic Celeste Olalquiaga explains in her eccentric book, The Artificial Kingdom: On the Kitsch Experience(Pantheon, 1999), Victorians were in the habit of encasing once vital flora and fauna in glass, forever reducing them to generic specimens for visual pleasure. Unnerved by mass industrialization and obsessed with death, they fetishized carefully preserved objects on their parlor shelves: the more exotic, the more entrancing. Hennessy’s dark clouds and sculptural forms are particularly unsettling because we don’t know which specific narratives her meditations have conjured, yet they feel familiar and haunted, and harbor a quiet sense of urgency. Her aesthetic sensibility is both elegant and gothic. It manifests our futile desire to fossilize social histories as well as personal memories—even painful ones— in an ongoing effort to divine the future, ephemeral as it may be.
LYDIA MATTHEWS

Velvet
A texture can be violent as a poem written to invite transgression. Poetry: text of what is vulnerable. Something delicate as a textile woven in a context of vulnerability can be an invitation to violence. The artist who works with velvet knows that well as she takes it apart, as she deconstructs it in order to understand it: velvet is a like a text that is being read to find in it the poetry of delicate dissolution. She knows that velvet can be separated with fingers; that it can be translated into fuzz and thread. She knows that fingernails can take it apart, can unweave it, unravel it, so that out of that disintegration something unknown can take place. She knows that once separated its elements talk to each other with longing and that this longing creates a tension between them: she somehow negotiates this tension when she puts them back together, once she has translated the chaos of dissolution into meaning. The chaos of momentary death into fragile resurrection.
 
JUVENAL ACOSTA

APRIL: word: MARK SANFORD GROSS art : STEVEN ELLIOTT

Birthdays
Steven Elliott paints with a wood burning device. Barely bent over, just enough to seem comfortable, his hand is as steady as his gaze. His workspace is simple. Absent are the cans filled with brushes and squeezed tubes of paint. Instead, a handful of bullet-like scorched metal tips lay on the tabletop beside his current project. On the wall behind him, a duet of images that must have been born on the road from this artist’s heart to his memory. I was hypnotized by his concentration and apprehensive about my trespass into his mental images.
He burned emotion into his work. Work that is void of the colors that bleed on conventional palettes. While it is difficult to articulate the feeling of watching him use hot and destructive material to create beauty and fragility, it is easy to feel the life in his work.
He worked. He burned each line as if he were creating a person, vein by vein. Emotion by emotion. While invited, I felt intrusive and oddly vulnerable. I turned to the wall, to the images, with a cautious tilt of my head, feeling guilty as if I had stumbled across a close friend’s open journal.
There is a time when art touches your own palette. There is a time when an artist’s work is a minefield for your own emotions. And there is a time when art goes into quiet places. The place inside your own soul. An ageless place. One that has traveled your existence. The place found in old attic trunks and dusty boxes. A place that people record into diaries. One place that has not been photographed. Steven’s work takes me to these places. He records the delicate lyrics of time’s song. As if a precious memory was being branded into a piece of stretched canvas. A tattoo inked into skin.

I asked Steven to explain his work. More as a formality or, perhaps, to fill the vulnerable silence. I learned about his images, his process and the mechanics. The basics you learn during a first meeting with an artist. When you’re still strangers. And while he spoke of his focus, his method and his craft, I heard the depths of his passion and emotion. I watched guarded joy grin in his eyes.
I am drawn to the lone passenger in “Dreaming of Home.” It brings me to thinking about how many times I have felt away from home as I sat on the doorstep. It reminds me of the dark times when I believed there was another place shimmering with pearls. It brings on an unexpected shiver. I thought of the homes I have lived in. The ones I rowed to. And, the ones I ultimately found. I felt the lonely waters that lay between them and the tides that seemed to be running on batteries almost drained.
Steven’s work contains a simple painted color. A base layer of uncomplicated blue, subtle as a morning vacation sky. A fragile blue. Like tissue paper in a gift box that protects the pearls he uses on his choice of canvas. Glistening “pops” that seem to percolate in faces, like the ones children stare at in the moon. Fractured pellets of lights in hollow windows. Translucent angels nodding their heads in rays of light..
I am also drawn to the image drawn from the Boy Scout Handbook chapter on “How to Save a Struggling Body.” Two figures glide uneasily above the surface of dark water surrounded by a cascade of pearls that acts not so much as a frame but as an aura. I see a saving hero and a struggling body. I think about one person being born out of another person within himself. Drowning infused with metaphor and physical manifestation.
I am brought back to one summer day in my childhood. Maybe the same time the books that Steven uses for inspiration were illustrated. My mom was engaged in a pool-side game that four women play around a square plastic table while their husbands fill up their forty-hour time-cards. The sky was the same blue as in Steven’s image. I remember running around the rectangular pool, laughing and careless, an illustration in a 1950’s first-grade reader. I never felt the concrete floor disappear. I noticed the big number 7’s painted on the tiled walls around me rise quickly above my head. The sunlight diffused, breaking into drops and colors like the pearls in Steven’s image before me. My arms stretched to the sky more as if I was in a dance than in a struggle. I do not remember fear. I remember peace and comfort as if I was being wrapped up in an overstuffed blanket. And then a giant arm snaked around my seven-year old chest and took me on a torpedo ride to the surface. Decades later and far from the Catskills, I find myself in Stevens’s studio thinking of my nameless giant and the glistening pearls.
I believe that the pearls of life shine a dim light around dark corners and give direction. They are the buoys to grab onto atop the surface of deep oceans. They are the eyes of the one who reaches out and leads you to safety in the darkness. Steven’s work frames moments in life. His tender hand guides heat and metal to scorch characters onto a stage made from a block of wood. He sprinkles them with the subtle vibrancy and glow found in the tenderness of carefully selected pearls and beads that come from places and people with their own stories.
One of Steven’s reference books – a tattered grade school science textbook from 1954 – reminds me of the book my grandfather read to me every day as I tried to learn the words. I remember the joy I felt when I finished “Fun With Dick and Jane” for the first time by myself. The book still sits on my shelf.

Steven Elliott has managed to burn a handful of memories into wood as they have been burned into my memory. But it is more than this. He managed to capture everything since that day by the pool and those days on my grandfather’s lap. A stranger to my life, his few works spoke in detail of my journey from dreaming of home to coming home.
There is an abundance of art in our world. I have many responses to exhibitions, installations and pieces of work. But Steven’s work invokes a new response. It is work that I trust. Like trusting that someone will come wrap their arms around me in a dark place. Art that I feel with an absence of words.

MARK SANFORD GROSS 2007

FEBRUARY: word: JAMES NESTOR art : JEFF MORRIS

JEFF MORRISStraight lines. Crooked lines. Horizon lines. Cracks and fissures. Lines that separate the mountains and sky and sea.

Lines are the subjects of Jeff Morris’ work. But not just lines. It’s the spaces outside and inbetween the lines, around the lines, their shapes and colors, where they start and stop – these are the real players in these pieces. Because as each line is magnified and manipulated and abstracted in form and in hue, so are the spaces that surround it, so is the meaning and our perception also changed. Light turns to dark, day to night, unmoving earth becomes ephemeral air – definition is redefined

And plastic, always plastic. For Morris the used plastic bag isn’t trash, it’s a bright exclamation mark punctuating a gray landscape. It’s “found” color. And it’s mimicking nature too. Like the spore traveling from the flower to its growing place in the earth, so too does the plastic bag travel from the super market, trash can, or arthritic hand, floating across the landscape until it lands on the barb of a rusted fence. But unlike the spore, which will grow then die, the plastic bag will remain on the fence, or in a weedy lot, or buried underground -- in our memories – forever, never fading, never disintegrating, always bright and colorful.

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Untitled and When Yes on N Becomes No on N

Remove all the words from a dictionary and what do you have? Blank pages, bound paper -- a fresh start. This is the approach Morris took to a series of banner flags. Hanging from buildings like stalactites, these flags traditionally have one purpose: to instantly grab our attention to sell us something, to lure us into a convenience store, car wash, mini-mall gym. But when the words are removed, when the color is stripped away and they no longer serve the purpose for which they were made, what are these flags? Morris suggests they are blank slates, “fresh starts,” to which we can apply our own colors, words, and meaning. On the creation of When Yes on N becomes No on N:

“I was a huge proponent of Proposition N in Oakland, where I live. I put a bunch of these election signs in my front yard. When the proposition failed, the message on these signs was useless. I wanted to remove the failure I felt when I looked at them, to be able to look at them in a different way – a new life.”

Drawings

Morris has always been attracted to tide charts not for what they are communicating – ebb and flood, wind direction, swell height -- but how they communicate it. “I’m fascinated by how all the colors [on tide charts] are assigned to a movement or a time of day, how there is meaning attached to each color,” he explains. “They make the abstract concrete, in graceful, simple way.” Morris sought to redefine both color and meaning in this series of color-pencil drawings. His goal was to remove the affiliation and meaning of the colors, and allow us to appreciate the tide chart on a different, aesthetic level. In doing so, the concrete is made abstract, again.

“Yesterday I came upon a plastic quart bottle of oil, run down by a car, with its contents exploded on the side of the building, flowering in an arc, an incredible pattern. You start looking at it, really looking at it, and all these different shapes and their permanence start to reveal themselves.”

JAMES NESTOR 2007

FEBRUARY: word: PATRICIA MALONEY art : SARAH SMITH

The Regalia of the New Republic: the work of Sarah Smith

I was six years old during the Bicentennial celebration of this country’s birth and what I remember most clearly about that year was the 4th of July parade. My entire family dressed in colonial garb and stood along Hackensack Street in Bergen County, NJ, waving to the similarly attired Minutemen who recreated the route taken by Washington and his troops two hundred years previous. Afterwards, permanent navy-and-gold signs were erected to mark that same path, and though I walked passed one on a daily basis, it was years before I bothered to notice what had actually been commemorated was Washington’s retreat from and near defeat at the hands of the British.

It is within such disjointed spaces such as this - between the real history of a place and the history that one is taught, or between that teaching and its subsequent recall – that Sarah Smith situates her drawings and wall tableaux . She reassembles the regalia of the New Republic into contemporary allegories in which might succumbs to disillusionment and certainty yields to loss. In the visual narratives Smith offers her audience, banners, radiant bursts, crowns of acanthus leaves, and neoclassical friezes share the same space and temporality as tree stumps, burnt and broken arrows, preying eagles, and prone wolves.

The term “theatre of war” is used to delineate the specific geographic region where a conflict occurs, but once removed from that context, carries the implication of spectacle and posturing, of prevarication and illusion. There is a close link between the current war’s theatricality – particularly in its false pretenses, its punditry, and our sense of removal from it- and the construction of Smith’s drawings, either on paper or as sculpture. It is not accidental that she utilizes the same muslin employed in constructing backdrops or, as in Overture to Memory’s Passage, her 2005 installation at Kala Art Institute, approximates a proscenium arch from Doric columns morphing into broken tree trunks. Theatre is both escape and illusion, and Smith traffics heavily in the need to convey and preserve illusion.

What distinguishes Smith’s work from theatre, her tableaux from stage sets, is the lack of human presence. Her installations do not intend to be immersive, nor do her narratives require human actors in order to unfold. In other words, the scenes she creates are not in limbo, waiting to be activated by their audience. They already exist as part of a continuum that presupposes them; embedded in a collective memory that conflates history and myth in order to point to glory. The symbols that recur throughout Smith’s works are loaded with this memory, but cannot bear the weight of it.

For example, in Strongly into the Everafter, a 2006 wall sculpture installed at Stay Gold Gallery in Brooklyn, an eagle with wings outstretched perches on a shield of draped cloth supported by branches, from which hang garlands of roses entwined with song birds. The roses are wilted, however; the branches are bare, and the birds limp and lifeless. As a result, the imposing eagle resembles less a majestic bird of prey and more a carrion crow. This is not the heraldry of a victorious army; it is the coat of arms of a decimated idealism.

Similarly, in an untitled installation at the Headlands Center for the Arts in 2006, 800 arrows encircled the columns in the third floor exhibition space of the former military barracks. Smith borrows the composition directly from the crepuscular rays frequently found on altarpieces to denote the glory of God. In this piece, though, all the arrows were broken and the end of each was charred. The arrow is a loaded symbol, acting both a weapon and a graphic representation of direction or force. For Smith, the number added another layer of significance, as a quantity concrete enough to be recognized but too large to be quickly counted. Any individual arrow was lost in the mass of them – just as an individual soldier is more readily recognized as a statistic of war.

Nothing is whole and nothing is new. Every element is recycled, not only her recurring emblems, but her materials and colors as well. Smith restricts her palette to sepia washes, browns, and grays. A composite gold leaf is a recent addition, but even that is corroded with acid to sketch out her figures. Besides the acid, she draws with acrylic and ink, on muslin and most frequently, salvaged wood. Her choice of materials and palette enforce a particular stance towards her symbolism, simultaneously one of nostalgia and of distance. Again, Smith does not have the intention to immerse the viewer in her allegories. While her imagery possesses an historical specificity and resides in collective memory, there is no emotional resonance to the symbols themselves. Instead, the nostalgia that is evoked is for a set of ideals that were lost long before they were learned.

Perhaps, then the most poignant figure that occurs in her tableaux is a lone wolf, reduced in scale, caught up in webs and chains, or standing at a precipice. It exists in a stillness that becomes an eternity. It is not predatory; instead, it bears the burden of representing both the inception and the decline of an empire, one often invoked in comparison to our own. It resides, as we might, in the void between the idealism and hubris, glory and destruction.


PATRICIA MALONEY 2007

JANUARY: word: JENNIFER PILCH art : JENNIFER STARKWEATHER

THERE AND BACK AGAIN


Tracing the skin on an oblique plot, slowly the
Field of memory pops. Even the shadowed and
Veiled, windows on the map. And yellow
Aspen mandalas, spinning tops to orient us?
The bluff, microscopic, lumbering across a
Sample plate? Through receding puddle rings
Over alien mud shingles, you return to the
Daily fix: the tear, the puncture, the cover-up
The crop. Marks adorn and bind us to the picture
Are we journeying back or anchored toward?
Snowflakes falling in a silent story? Constellations
Groping through murky atmosphere? A tree's
Silhouette each year slightly changeable? A
Stranger form from barely escaping, more
Beautiful the light


JENNIFER PILCH,2006

JANUARY: word: BRIAN ANDREWS art : LAUREN DAVIES

In 1926, Carl Akeley died a cinematically appropriate death. Overcome by fever, he collapsed leading his fifth safari expedition into the dark continent, and was buried in the jungles of what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While his name is not commonly known, his work still tints the lens of how we see the natural world and the role of our species in it. Akeley was a premiere turn of the century naturalist. He developed revolutionary techniques of taxidermy at the Chicago Museum of Natural History (now the Field Museum), and was entrusted with building the primary collections and displays for the American Museum of Natural History in New York. To fill the museums’ halls, Akeley led massive expeditions into the colonial lands of Africa. He hunted in the bush with cameras as well as firearms, returning with specimens, hides, photographs, and masks of his kills cast in plaster. These materials were transformed into breathtaking displays, the likes of which were never previously seen. No longer the stuffed automata of the curious collector, Akeley had the skill to mount his taxidermy as if alive in the wild. He presented the wild in romantic visual narratives: a herd of elephants alerting to a threat; a pride of lions protecting their kill; a mother giraffe with her new born calf; the great silverback gorilla staring down the viewer with self recognition. Tableaux spoke of predation, reproduction, and hierarchy within an aura of uncanny truth seeping from the cured hides. If defining something truly gives one power over it, then Akeley’s effect on our visual culture is deep. Akeley exhibited nature as nobly wild: ferocious, sensual, and honorable. He can be seen like a character from a Jules Verne novel, grandly carrying western ideals into unknown places only to have his own psychology reflected in his vision. In the unfolding decades he has been critiqued as a sexist, racist aristocrat who projected his anthropomorphisms and political fantasies into lands around him. All of which is probably true. But his animals still stare back at us, asking us to see nature as a story, an image, a diorama.

Lauren Davies has not been to Africa. Nor have I. And more than likely you, dear reader, haven’t either. But we talk about it. We talk about tourism and politics. We talk about safaris, race, climate change, genocide, giraffes, hunger, music, colonialism, trade routes, diamonds, deserts, jungles, malaria, AIDS, indigenous traditions, festivals, chimpanzees, bush meat, Christian missionaries, Islam, corruption, globalism, celebrity activism, art, oil, and lions. This conversation revolves around a place we only know from discourse. Our knowledge of Africa comes from a cascade of frames crossing in and out of the classroom. The work of Akeley begat National Geographic begat the Discovery Channel begat Wikipedia. With all of our contemporary knowledge, we don’t think of ourselves as in the same trap of fantasy as Akeley. Somehow our fluidity of information and a post-stucturalist self awareness relieve us of colonialist anthropomorphic guilt. If anything, it’s more fun this way. More insightful. We believe we can talk about things and understand their political subtexts at the same time.

It seems entirely appropriate that Lauren Davies’ investigation into Dominion began in a flea market in provincial France with the purchase of an aging map of the African continent. From this object she created African Map a series of digital images taken from the map and printed on cloth. The images focus on the deteriorating patina of the cartography where lines and figures compete with moldy stains for visual and cognitive meaning. As we explore its surface, we see political demarcations from times past, its facade littered with names of places both real and imagined. The surface has aged away completely in some areas, its regions twisting into an abstraction of linen and pulp, as if the territory was reclaiming itself from the mapmaker.

Davies directly engages the visual legacies of natural history museums with her wall mounted dioramas. In Petting Zoo / Pongo a glass display case contains a loose installation of string, cardboard and various foam rubbers. A matted furry hand of a primate is perched on a tube and set against a graphite line drawing of a banana on ruled paper. The materials feel educational, as if salvaged from an aging elementary school. A stenciled cardboard placard reads “Pongo” identifying the primate hand as the student and subject of the institutional pedagogy. This museological frame is reduced to its roots as a Wunderkammer - a cabinet of curiosities where we witness one of our closest genetic relatives prove its cognitive abilities as it is enculturated into a western educational framework. Our own presumptions of the natural world are viscerally challenged by Glove, a mate to the primate hand in the diorama which has been littered on the gallery floor. This hand is not mounted and displayed as a clean specimen behind glass, rather it resides in the same space the viewer occupies revealing its severed materiality. This intimate observation exposes its construction as plaster layered in paint and animal hair. It simultaneously evokes a cast off garment and a trophy from a bush meat hunt. An unknown violence has placed this object in the viewer’s path, asking us to surmise its trauma. These two hands bracket the range of relationships our species maintain with our close relatives in the natural word. We look around only to find ourselves as fellow members of Akeley’s safari: scientists, educators, and hunters.

As I noted before, Lauren Davies has not been to Africa. But she’s been to the museum and been entranced and terrified and perplexed by what she’s seen. And that’s fascinating.

BRIAN ANDREWS, 2006


References:
Akeley, Mary L. Jobe. Carl Akeley's Africa: The account of the Akeley-Eastman-Pomeroy African Hall Expedition of the American Museum of Natural History. New York: Blue Bell Books. 1931.
Haraway, Donna. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, Inc. 1989.