Fabricators (Recent Bay Area Sculpture)• The Center for the Arts at Yerba Buena Gardens, San Francisco
After nearly two years of programming,
the Center for the Arts at Yerba Buena Gardens has had its fair share
of false starts and a few miscues, including the questionable artifact-
and movie prop-ridden exhibition, “The Art of Star Wars.” One
had to think: so what’s next, “Pocahontas: the Retrospective”?
Okay, so I’m being a little snippy here; actually the “Star
Wars” exhibition was a pretty ingenuous way for a newly-formed institution
to raise awareness, attendance, and address the ever-increasing need for
funding by driving straight to the heart of a popular culture phenomenon.
With “Fabricators (Recent Bay Area Sculpture),” center director/curator
Renny Pritikin has once again approached popular culture ideologies, but
from a completely different angle. With the selection of D-L Alvarez,
Marisa Hernandez, Melissa Pokorny, and Michelle Rollman, the Center has
assembled an exhibition that finally hits the mark. These young artists,
all about thirtyish, virtually reach into the existing viscera of popular
culture and extract, snip, cut, sew, screw, weld and fetishize their works
from the wide consumerist body. The material sources for the works range
from salvage yards to Home Depot; welding shops to Super K; from the Salvation
Army to some obscure upholstery shop with a great stash of queasy green
furry fabric or that irresistible silver-skinned Naugahyde.
While there is no apparent shared school among these four artists, they
do break down into interesting pairs. Alvarez and Rollman both make use
of narrative and the situational in the works they produce. Hernandez
and Pokorny apply their formal concerns to site, surface, physicality,
and facade.
In the work of D-L Alvarez, early influences as a writer, performance
artist, and set designer are clearly evident. Even though the theatricality
of the work is downplayed, the narrative structure remains fully intact.
carriers eloquently demonstrates this strategy. A long plywood structure
that slopes up the gallery wall doubles as a giant delivery ramp and stage
setting. Two square posts rise from the stage floor; at the base of each
post is a neat pile of wrapped brown-papered packages. Hanging from each
post are identical brown delivery uniforms with embroidered name tags,
Augie and Ethel respectively. The backdrop of this ghostlike tableau is
an enlarged paint-by-numbers outline of a suburban landscape drawn directly
on the wall in graphite pencil. The picture Alvarez draws for us is neither
horrific nor idyllic. It seems to be caught in a perpetual state of banality;
it’s apparent that the work leaves the commentary up to the viewer.
Banality and ordinariness have a way of leaving things open for interpretation;
you can alter the surface readily or fill in the gaps to suit your own
needs.
Directly across from Alvarez is Michelle Rollman’s three-ringed installation
three ringed circus. As in past work, Rollman continues to fabricate stuffed
rabbits, birds, snakes, and flying squirrels, suited up in highly fetishized
costumes, embellished with beads, sequins, bones, and feathers. These
taxidermic doubles are cast as metaphors for the human condition. All
of the performers here are caught in never-ending cycles of repeated tasks.
Rollman straightforwardly addresses the issues of power, control, and
tragedy. The real drama, however, is best realized high above the three-ring
framework with the high-wire trapeze act. There the Flying Wallenda squirrels
perform their harrowing feats. One Wallenda futilely attempts to make
the leap, but too great a distance and insufficient speed render the stunt
impossible. The other Wallenda remains motionless and powerless; it’s
only a matter of time before he drops from exhaustion.
Melissa Pokorny’s sculptures are rude, compulsive, and deceptively
formal. Pokorny attaches polyurethane forms cast from plastic dime-store
toy animals to found furniture. The result is a hybrid. garden scheme
(grotto) is an awkwardly and precariously stacked pile of polyurethane
elephants in assorted shades of toxic green. Sulfuric mice parasitically
attach themselves to the elephants as more polyurethane foam oozes out
and spills over the entire disastrous amalgam. Whereas modernist and late
modernist sculptors such as Smith and Serra consumed massive amounts of
space, volume, and industrial materials, Pokorny’s work does not
limit itself to spatial and volumetric considerations: those strategies
are inherent. Pokorny’s generational spin also addresses issues of
overproduction and consumption, pointing out the viral aspects of a bloated
hyper-consumerist society complete with its own sticky, smiley-faced icons.
Marisa Hernandez divulges the “feminine” in architecture by
subverting its historical and literal forms. She recontextualizes the
baroque by fabricating an architectural facade with decidedly collapsible
materials such as vinyl and velvet. silver serenade incorporates two painted
silver bands, each 12 inches wide, which rise 14 feet high. Pinned to
the bands are a series of tightly sewn and pleated silver vinyl forms
that mimic column fluting and other forms of architectural ornamentation.
Flanking the silver configuration are two coiling garlands of velvet leaves
that hang and loop downward, finally stretching out like a vine onto the
gallery floor. Hernandez’s revelation asserts that historical masculine
notions of strength, monumentality, and the heroic can be debased and
reauthored with the unheroic, a self-assured sense of beauty, and a few
upholstery tacks.
Finally, there is one element in the exhibition that seems to be lacking
overall: cynicism. Much of the work takes on the surrounding cultural
landscape, and in fact shouldn’t result in such a pretty picture.
I’d be a little careless to proclaim optimism here, but what the
hell, let the celebration begin. Kevin Radley
San Francisco, California
1995