SMOKE 'EM IF YA GOT 'EM
Or, more to the point, resources are where you find them. Too many artists sit around waiting to be discovered, imagining that years of hoarding their secretive work away from the dreckish temptation of open studios, café exhibitions and creating a fake Indian name in order to sell at Market will finally result in being discovered. It's the artist version of an actor with standards, passing on porn jobs, slasher flicks and deodorant commercials because they believe Harvey Weinstein
will drive by in his limo and hook them up with the lead in a respectable quasi-indie flick that not only achieves critical acclaim but, you know, pays well. The bad news is that basically none of those actors ever get discovered and the same is true for visual artists entertaining the same fantasies, though many of both do go on to exciting careers in second-tier service jobs. The good news is that, while making up an Indian name is a good way to lose the
respect of your peers and get your ass kicked, showing your art in a café isn't nearly as bad as making a porno, especially one based on a deodorant commercial.
But it takes a whole lot less to mount an art exhibition with integrity than it does to produce a film or even a theater production. And while it may appear from deep within the throes of artistic depression that Santa Fe is ripe with uncaring mega-galleries churning out a high-dollar art product equal in quality to, say, major Hollywood studio offerings, the fact is that a clear look around will show any number of copacetic cafés and heroic alternative spaces working their asses off for nothing more than love of the work. The alt.spaces are the real heart and soul of Santa Fe's art scene, allowing for both exciting and dubious projects without fear of commercial viability or even artistic success at every turn. If you aren't hitting No Man's Land or Half Rack or Open Source, to name a few alternative venues, then ya ain't following the scene. This week's hero is definitely Bang!, which played host over the May Day weekend to
Dead Word
, a collaborative project by Ian Ingram and Rocky Lewycky that was as elegant in its construction as in its concept. If you missed it, you can't see it now-Bang! shows hang for a only a weekend at a time as organizer/curator David Solomon slams together show after show when the space isn't being used for art supply store Artisan's comprehensive line-up of workshops. It is the epitome of using what's available and smoking what ya got.
Though work was for sale (and selling) the project at Bang! (717 Canyon Road, 988-2179) didn't much care about profit. The two collaborators moved from an initial meditation on the commodification and mainstreaming of graffiti toward a more activist Om on Iraq and the Western culture of commodification's larger meddling in the Middle East. The graffiti inspiration remained with a focus on the form of language, though Arabic calligraphy became the medium. Ingram drew, with photo-realist panache a series of hands open to multiple interpretations but implying most of all prayer or deference and Lewycky overlaid the back side with pages drilled through with the calligraphy. Suspended in cast resin, each side imprints onto the other and each piece, like information and cultural understanding, offers varying levels of opacity and transparence. Hung all in a row, with the calligraphy achieving shifting levels of distortion and design, the effect is graphic and immediate, but with inspection risks a haze of missed translations and trapped ideas. For me these resin works read as maquettes and the pleasure was envisioning them on a grand scale, hung four stories high off a series of buildings or comprising the walls of a confounding and wonderful maze. More intimate and approachable was a series across the room, a by-product of creating the resin works; as Lewycky drilled each page, he used gypsum wallboard as a backing and the swirl of indented shape and language against the negative space left by Ingram's hand is made poignant, sad and impossibly rich because of the softer material and its resonance with the built environment and a sense of safety, of construction rather than destruction.
Both series' were brought home by a large collaborative work at the end of the room, a backlit drawing, perfect in its composition, depicting a tangled pile of emaciated bodies atop a precise, clean and sometimes invisible surface of US dollar bills, again rendered through Lewycky's deliberate and measured drilling of the paper. It is a work of astonishing impact and surprising success for two artists whose personal work goes in wildly different directions. Though the show was really a complete installation for the weekend, each individual piece is worth an examination and, as Ingram exhibits with Turner Carroll (725 Canyon Road, 986-9800) rumor has it that diligent enthusiasts may be able to sneak a peak by begging the gallery to bust out. On Friday, May 6 from 5 to 7 pm, Bang! opens an exhibition of paintings by Lisa Corradino which should prove a very different, but equally engaging experience.
FISH TALES
Regarding the few faculty members in the College of Santa Fe Art Department who are so frustrated and confounded by the Annual Juried Student Exhibition for 2005, dubbed
Fit
, for which I was one of the jurors:
Allow me to propose that art is more than a physical practice. Art is a means of communication and investigation equal to language or science and art serves its most valuable role when it functions as a mode of inquiry, assertion and instigation. Praise and convention equate to stagnation. Dialogue and disequilibrium equal success. So, for those faculty suggesting shenanigans, disrespect for craft, quoting this column out of context in two-page rants and attempting to mount an argument against the exhibition's validity, I offer three simple words: HOOK, LINE, SINKER.
