On Saturday, January 30, from 4:30 to 7 p.m., a reception will be held at the Grace Hudson Museum for In the Construction Zone: Mendocino County Assemblage Art, a new exhibit featuring diverse and surprising works by County residents Spencer Brewer, Larry Fuente, Joan Giannecchini, Esther Siegel, Susan Spencer, Denver Tuttle and Michael Wilson. The artists and Curator Karen Holmes will be present at the reception, and all are warmly invited.
If you have ever felt that your life was a work in process, you are not alone. Early in the twentieth century, artists such as Pablo Picasso and Marcel Duchamp began to create work that was as much process as product. Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase (1912) showed the tracks of a body in motion at a time when the moving picture was just making inroads into culture. Duchamp also famously scrawled on a urinal and claimed it as art, igniting a controversy but also encouraging artists to look to the detritus of everyday life for inspiration. Assemblage Art, named such by Jean Dubuffet in the 1950s, came to be seen as an art form of its own, a hybrid of painting and sculpture. Soon, respected artists such as Joseph Cornell and Louise Nevelson made Assemblage Art their main form of expression, and subcultures from punk rockers of the 80s to the present-day steampunk movement were joining together objects in ever more fantastic forms.
Assemblage artists commonly use found objects, combined together in improbable ways that suggest new structures and create new stories. Materials employed in Assemblage Art are endless and include fabric, metal, buttons, cardboard, photographs, feathers and other animal parts, beads, dolls, ritual and religious objects and car parts—a list only limited by an artist's ability to wrestle an unlikely object into counterpoint, however unwieldy, with another.
The seven artists in this show make use of the Assemblage medium in as many far-ranging and varied ways as Mendocino County itself, with some artists mainly using found objects and others assembling or adorning new forms. In her series "The Celestials," Joan Giannecchini creates presence where there was absence by recreating the history of hitherto ignored Chinese immigrants in Nevada, layering black and white photos with brightly colored desert landscapes to evoke a theater of the imagination. Esther Siegel crafts assemblages where toys and books merge, adorns tea kettles with doll parts, and turns utilitarian objects into unexpected new forms. Improbable worlds—whimsical, yet also ironic—are created. Michael Wilson's assemblages have a more reverent tone, bringing photographs and other objects from the past into gravely beautiful circles and boxes that evince their own poetic logic. Susan Spencer combines old objects weighted with meaning—wheels, pyramids, wings—into Cornell-like boxes and statues that somehow are both mystical and humorous. Since these objects have been detached from the context that imbued them with authority, it is now up to the viewer to endow them with meaning.
The way in which meaning is construed somewhere between the artist's work and the viewer's eye is a central concern of artist Denver Tuttle. Using silicone, reflective Duralar, and other non-transparent materials, Tuttle creates trompe l'oeil objects that resemble mirrors, gems and other reflective and see-through items. Musical entrepreneur Spencer Brewer will display his Tesla Man, a humanoid figure embedded with electrical implants that glow when plugged in, built with Dick Billups. (Visitors can enjoy a fully electrified Tesla Man on Sunday, Feb. 21, when Brewer gives a gallery tour along with other artists.) Finally, Larry Fuente, whose work is on display at the Smithsonian, lets loose his imagination on everything from animal display models to human mannequins, using beads, shells and jewelry that transform everyday objects into carnivalesque celebrations, with wildly proliferating colors and designs.
Curator Karen Holmes and Museum Director Sherrie Smith-Ferri felt that, since the Museum itself was in the middle of a multistage construction project, this was the perfect time to invite in artists whose work reflects that same sense of being in process. In addition to interior renovation, the exterior grounds of the Museum are being expanded and reconfigured into a series of native plant gardens with outdoor educational exhibits that highlight Pomo Indian land use, a rainwater harvesting system and many other exciting elements. As the Museum continues its project of preserving Grace Hudson's legacy along with that of Pomo Indian peoples, Holmes hopes that this exhibit of contemporary artwork will expand the Museum's circle of visitors and draw in more young people, as well as fans of Modern art.
In the Construction Zone: Mendocino County Assemblage Art will be on display from January 30 to April 17, 2016. Special events will include an artists' gallery tour on Sunday, Feb. 21 with Spencer Brewer, Esther Siegel, Susan Spencer and Michael Wilson (Joan Giannecchini, Denver Tuttle and Larry Fuente will give a tour on April 9); a First Friday Art Walk on March 4 and April 1, when the Museum is open for free in the evening; and a Family Fun at the Museum event on March 12.
The Grace Hudson Museum is at 431 S. Main St. in Ukiah and is open Wednesday through Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., and Sunday from noon to 4:30 p.m. For more information please call 467-2836 or go to www.gracehudsonmuseum.org.
(press release by Roberta Werdinger)
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