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What:
Mealy Mouthed Materials, Charismatic Shapes, and Other Funny Stories

Where:
The Ewing Gallery of Art and Architecture, UT

When:
Through February 6

Seven artists bring their roving show to Knoxville

by Heather Joyner

Kids love the idea of inanimate objects coming to life when no one is looking. Big children, too, delight in the notion...dawn breaking over the nursery as the mischief winds down. At present, the Ewing Gallery features three-dimensional works that seem caught in the act of transformation. Otherwise mundane things like bolt carpeting, cardboard, and tin foil assume otherworldly forms with surprising connotations. You could call the show "Pee Wee's Playhouse meets the Dalai Lama" or dismiss it as screwball. Whatever your take, it's nothing if not memorable.

On January 13, exhibit organizer Sally Gil and her husband Kenneth Johnston arrived in Knoxville having begun their day in Brooklyn. Here for the opening of Mealy Mouthed Materials, Charismatic Shapes, and Other Funny Stories, they hosted a slide presentation and gallery talk. At the lectern, Gil presented a range of images—holiday kitsch alongside works by Eva Hesse, Claes Oldenburg, and Richard Serra (which made the coiled extension cord behind Gil look like an installation, as well). Characterizing her own sculpture as a reaction against "the lifeless seamlessness" of certain '80s art, she described an attraction to everyday materials and their potential in what she terms "cultural collage."

Looking at her tower of chicken wire and felt cylinders, we realize that Gil's aesthetic is both democratic and wonderfully simple. One begins with accessible, affordable materials that have large-scale possibilities and through them one expresses something about one's individual perspective. Gil explained that there's a logic to why we assemble matter in formal arrangements. Mentioning Cézanne, she said, "Early on he painted the straight paintings and then he channeled himself to try to depict his experience of seeing...his experience of being in the world and what it was to take the world in through [his] eyes...he wrote that he relied on his sister, his sister relied on her priest, her priest relied on the church, the church relied on the Pope, and the Pope relied on Rome. When I look at his pictures, I see how everything is very structural and how all the parts pull together as a whole, and [I] see the way he built the picture."

Process and expansion, in other words. An emphasis not so much on the final piece as on its evolution and what that sequence of actions says about an artist. Gil acknowledges that sheer pleasure is part of her motivation, and a sense of play also comes through in the works of Johnston, Lucky DeBellevue, Paul Dickerson, Barbara Gallucci, Elana Herzog, and Daniel Wiener. According to the exhibit catalogue's writer Bill Arning, "To deliberately move away from perfection, one must estheticize inelegance and deliberate tastelessness...the hallowed ground of art history has become a playground, Palisades Park even, due to the efforts of affectionate recoders like the seven assembled before us"—not that their art is slapdash or shallow simply because it's experimental. Gil's fragile "anti-monuments" are tragic as well as jaunty; reminders of the temporal nature of all that exists. Johnston's untitled assemblage of precariously stacked cardboard shapes could be a totem pole for Office Depot. Strips of orange, blue, black, white, and regular masking tape both hold the sculpture together and lend it a striated appearance reminiscent of Pacific Northwest Native American art. Speaking of which, Johnston has topped his tower with a catch-as-catch-can "head" like that of a Hopi kachina doll. It's as if he's suggesting that our modern spirits don't warrant representation through the use of cottonwood but instead through something far more disposable. The late Dickerson's creations are semi apocalyptic-looking works that include a plastic- wrapped fuel tank resembling a post-industrial cocoon and a splattered chunk of cement titled "Sad Sack."

On the somewhat lighter side are Gallucci's carpet pieces—so '70s suburban and downright ugly they're iconic in the best sense of the word. Herzog's festooned fabric with elastic (betraying its origins as bedding) has a disco era feel as well, and the elastic acts like sinew connecting the guts of her work. More beautiful in terms of shape than substance, her pieces seem oddly lyrical. New Orleans native DeBellevue displays something like a drag queen's makeshift tiara and, heaped on the gallery floor, a vibrant red scumble of chenille stems woven together into a sort of net. Wiener's "Babel," made of hydrocal, wire, and sculpey, looks like a suspended sea grape submarine with exotic plummage.

Writes Arning, "[We envy a time] when an art discussion could lead to besotted fisticuffs, rather than the late '90s mode in which artists of radically different strategies all get along. Not that the earlier mode was better but merely because it must have been exciting....now with the age of manifestos passed, the impossible and improbable hybrids are the order of our day, as this exhibition makes clear." He also asks, "Why not hybridize post-minimalism and Disneyland Fantasias until they look like oversized aquarium ornaments? Why not do soft-sculpture with carpet or polyester blankets? Why not embrace awkwardness as a virtue in stretch wrap or quote Brancusi's endless column in cardboard doll parts? Why not make an off-kilter cube in chicken wire with a fuzzy wig on top? For these seven artists history is made new, given fresh currency, only by claiming the tradition as their own—in the here and now." And that intriguing "now" is here for the next 18 days.