Playing With Chaos

The new show at Studio Place Arts (SPA) in Barre is Chaos: Pandemonium, Disorder & Turbulence in Art.

Today a small group of artists met to create a collaborative installation suspended from the ceiling of the gallery. Jody Brown, Chris Diego, Meg Hammond, Mark Lora, Ben Matchstick, Delia Robinson, Lars Hasselblad Torres, and I worked all day. Things were hung, switched, and re-jiggered.

We had a break for lunch and interesting conversation, and then we went back into the fray.

The final installation was really satisfying. Next week Jody Brown, Sue Higby and I will be hanging all the other 2- and 3-dimensional work that we selected for the show, which runs from January 21 – February 22, 2014.

PARADE: Thin Sections

PARADE: A Collaborative Installation

Janet Van Fleet: Thin Sections

Riki Moss: Passing Through

On Exhibit at the Living/Learning Gallery at UVM January 13 - February 7, 2014

Gallery Reception and Artist Talk, Thursday, January 23, 5:30 PM

More information

When we think of a parade (or our life's journey) we imagine a beginning and an end, with a fairly straight path between the first and the last points. But if we broaden our vision a bit, we will notice that we are not alone; other people are traveling along with us in the parade, sometimes marching very close by, but then moving away, sometimes disappearing onto unknown other paths and not coming back into our view.

If we broaden our scope again, we see that it is not only other humans parading along with us, but also animals, viruses, and millions of other lifeforms that surround us, each living lives that occasionally intersect with ours.

In this installation my wooden human and animal figures are interacting with Riki Moss's ethereal white paper beings. When she and I set up this exhibit, it was like a dance party, with each of my wooden creatures finding a paper partner with which it connected, often in wonderfully evocative pairings that suggest play, dance, love, and solidarity.

My original intention with this installation was to remove the bases from my figures and suspend them from the ceiling in a kind of curtain, like a thin section in biology or minerology -- a wafer thin slice of a material that allows scientists looking through a microscope to see how and where parts of a whole are connected, information that could not be known by looking only at the outside of the material.

But collaboration, like life, sometimes takes us in new directions, and now I think that the thin sections of the title may be the thin veil of our own skins, the place where I end and the Not-Me begins, that critical synapse across whose tiny gap we must leap to connect with others.

 

Come and have a look if you can, and join us on January 23.

More Office Art

GNI has moved to new, spiffier offices on State Street in Montpelier and I hung some more pieces in their space. It looks pretty good!

Upcoming Activities

Lots of good things are happening early in the New Year:

First, Riki Moss and I will be setting up an exhibit of our PARADE work at the Living/Learning Gallery at the University of Vermont. It will open on January 13, with a reception on January 23.

Next, I'm co-curating and exhibit called Chaos! at SPA with Jody Brown. We're working on January 11 to set up a collaborative chaotic installation on the ceiling in the gallery there, and then the show will open (with work also on the walls and floor) on January 21. Stay tuned.

Travel Journal

If you're interested in reading about my trip around Western Australia in October and November of 2013, you're welcome to have a look on my travel blog.

Your Junk, My Art

Some of my work is in an exhibit in Brandon, Vermont at the Compass Music and Arts Center . Your Junk My Art was curated by the wonderful Ruth Hamilton (who says that this experience has infected her with the curating bug, so now she has ideas for many more shows to come, which we can all hope to attend!).

This is a really a well-curated and beautifully-mounted show, with thirteen interesting artists, all making art with found, repurposed, and discarded objects. Each artist has a section with a selection of his or her pieces, that enriches appreciation of that person's work. If you are able, go and see it.

Gene Pool

I like the idea of the gene pool, where bodies meet, greet, play together, and create new human beings with new looks and capacities. It's like making art! It's also both humbling and exciting to think that each of us is a special new work that resulted from dipping into the Gene Pool, picking through all the bits and pieces and possibilities, and coming up with something altogether new.

I made a piece called Gene Pool in 2007 for an exhibit at 215 in Burlington, Vermont, in which buttons in a wooden bowl stood in for the colors of humans in the world, so this is the second iteration of the idea.

I made one commitment to producing artwork while I was in Australia this year, and that was to make a piece for Tarpspace, a project that called on artists to use a tarp as part of an installation or performance piece. As I walked through the piles of material behind the workshed at Zia Park, my sister Gail's equestrian center in Gidgegannup, my eye was caught by all the things that were tarp blue -- plastic tubs, old toys, and five fabulous tall chairs that might have been used for judging stands, or maybe for lifeguards at a pool. Zia Park has a wonderful cross-country course with all kinds of interesting jumps that are fun, colorful, and creative, so they accept materials that might turn into jumps somewhere down the line, and I expect that these chairs came to Zia Park in that way.

Here I was with my sister, on the other side of the planet, with my strong and enthusiastic nephew Rembert Yarrick to help, and the memory of my daughter Berrian's months-long involvement in reconstruction after Hurricaine Katrina in Louisiana in which blue tarps became icons of both effort and inaction. On the ground, the tarp looked like a pool -- a gene pool.

I started by gathering brush from one of the piles saved for a projected new jump, and binding them with wire to create bodies for five figures.

We gathered sticks for limbs and wired them to the bodies, then I screwed the figures securely to the chairs.

It took several days of work (as the temperature climbed and the flies swarmed), but we were all pleased with the final piece.

Each of the figures had a different head -- wood, stone, metal, and a piece of broken brick from Rottnest Island -- where I imagined it was one of the leftovers from the work of almost 4000 Aboriginal prisoners who did forced labor for a century (between 1838 and 1931)
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Here's the Gene Pool, showing the dis-articulated figures in the pool. To tell the truth, I actually removed this part of the piece before I left, because I preferred looking at the ground. There is an end to how much bright blue plastic one can enjoy...