MixedMedia

Around the holidays last year I’d made a promise to knock out a washboard table with a collage top for a family member. I’d gotten the basic idea from the remarkable Victoria Romanoff in Ithaca, New York at a meet up we’d had years ago.This go around, I’d found a couple of pricier washboards with glass rubbing plates. Cleaning them was quick enough, and the greatest challenge was compensating for their irregular sizes, which was accomplished by simply adding a 1-inch riser to the top of the right board, allowing equal heights and the lining up of the joist piece.The collage top itself was a lot of fun to create. Given that the intended recipient is a family member, I had lots of raw materials to cull from: maps from trips we’d taken together, cutouts from visits we’d made to Nova Scotia and elsewhere, scraps of my daughter’s artwork, etc. The piece came together well – unexpectedly “white” but to good effect.For the joist piece I simply cleaned up a piece of antique board found in the barn, painted it white, and sanded it down to enhance the texture and integrate it with the top piece.The most pleasant discovery in this piece of work is that one can place a light within the recess of the table between to the two legs and achieve a very nice glow to the piece. Something to think about for future, more sculptural works might be having the table closed on all four sides and illuminated. 

The German artist Martin Kippenberger who died in 1997 has a large installation of his work that sprawls among the white galleries of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. I’m not terribly familiar with this artist, but impressed that he’d turn a Gerhard Richter painting into a table – he’s as playful and anti-establishment as the range of media and styles suggests. The artist as subject, director  and actor in the social struggle to communicate. While the rest of us bicker about what’s a more relevant, authentic, salient, expedient or efficient mode of expression he tested them all, not binding expression to a fetish or a movement of the day. Perhaps that’s why “peter” – Martin’s term for all unnamed forms – is such an endearing and appropriate expression: compact, unadorned, slightly naughty (in the American context?) and affectionable. Holland Carter put it nicely in the New York Times: “If messy and raucous aren’t your thing, and tidy objects are, Kippenberger is not for you. Sometimes when I come up against his drunk-and-disorderly divahood I think he’s not for me. But he is, absolutely, or the idea of him is, meaning the model he sets for what an artist can be and do. His multitudinous recyclings, insubordinate temperament and generosity seem unexpectedly right for a non-party-time time. With the MoMA respective a new generation of artists will get to know him. I can imagine more than a few hitching themselves to his manic star.”

Andres Myers is a mixed media artist who’s work stands out from the usual. Its almost otherworldly. Familiar too. Layers of color like lacquer, applied carefully and used sculpturally – paper, cloth, plaster, tape, paint, wire – you name it, its there. Its also deliciously abstract – a lollipop that fell onto a sprinkles-covered ice cream cone melting in the summer sun in a little black box – vulnerable. Some of it, like the fissure works and those with clay, seem to have bubbled up from bizarre other worlds of color beneath tectonic plates – perhaps, “the space between the two- dimensional and three- dimensional, hybridizing painting, printmaking and sculpture” to nick her own words. Check out Andrea’s elegant site: Andrea Myers

While in New York recently for a “Greening the Arts” symposium [see below], I had the very good fortune to meet an artist, preservationist, and self-described “recycling fanatic” Victoria Romanoff. Touring her converted firestation – which serves as her home, studio, and office – I was struck by how full and well-lived her life is, a life reflected in a rich, multilayered perspective so richly conveyed in everything that she produces. The title of this post is inspired by what little I gleaned of her life and work and our shared interest in cities and towns, and our efforts to incorporate their influence into our artwork.

Victoria has this eye for the scuffle, bumps, and scrapes of life that are bound up in a scrap of wood or painted façade alike. Her materia prima is the detritus of decline – joints, pulleys, columns, slats, plugs, rods, handles, adornments and other objects salvaged from the waste-streams of the new-obsessed.

A group show curated by Ms Romanoff, titled “Haven’t We Met Before,” was recently brought down at the Thomkins County Public Library – I wish I’d been there in time to see it! Nonetheless, an exhibition catalogue is available online and I was able to both see a few of the works and get a better sense of the materials that compose her works during our visit.

Most important to me, I was introduced to the range of motifs captured in her dense works. I caught whiffs of the gothic, romantic and even baroque mustiness bound up in these very modern works (Constructivism meets Duchamp with a nod to Rauschenberg’s ‘combines’?). Here is her artist’s statement for the “Haven’t We Met Before” show:

I like to conjure up lost civilizations, improbable resorts, crumbling monuments, over-the-top architectural follies, opinionated statutory and other imaginary settings. Along with that, I enjoy puncturing pomposity and do my best to lead the viewer astray with absurd but hopefully humorous titles. My sculpture is always built from recycled elements: discarded wood, architectural remnants, cardboard tubes, old ropes, washboards and other flotsam and jetsam. The paper mosaics, as well, are reborn from scraps cut out of previous creations.

As far as I can tell, just about all of her materials could be found at historic preservation sites and dumps, which she gives new life through spontaneous composition, clever joinery, and uniform coating treatments. Another interesting aspect of Ms Romanoff’s work is that is serves equally well as functional and decorative works.

One disappointment: there’s not alot of her work online. You’ll have to meet her yourself and seek out every opportunity you can to find her works on view!

[Both images are nicked from the Thompkins County Library exhibition materials and the Havent We Me Before Catalogue]

My buddy Ward Joyce, by day a gifted architect, is working on something with his jewelry-making pal that I never thought would work: bicycle sculpture. In their inimitable way though they’ve brought a great conceptual edge to an otherwise whimsical public art project. Here’s an excerpt from coverage in our local paper:

MONTPELIER – Moving at a slow, deliberate speed, the metal crusher evoked groans and high-pitched squeals from the bicycles being tortured and crushed within its jaws.

“This is how bikes sound when they’re screaming,” said Carrie Baker, an employee of Onion River Sports, photographing the carnage.

She was on hand to capture the “sculptcycle” creation of artists Lochlin Smith and Ward Joyce as it came together – literally. Early Wednesday morning approximately 30 decrepit bikes were crushed into a 600-pound cube at Bolduc Auto Salvage in Middlesex.

Although it sounds like a new flavor of Hood’s frozen treats, SculptCycle is a project hosted by the Montpelier Downtown Community Association. Smith and Joyce are two of 20 artists selected to create sculptures using recycled bicycle parts. Read more…