ART REVIEW: "ReMixed"
By Rebecca Rafferty on December 17, 2008
I'm all about the blending of artistic media, and the people who run Potential Life Studios know that visual art and music are a great mix. This tiny, seriously hip gallery and music venue is co-owned by husband and wife team Jeremy and Colleen Dziedzic, who host both local experimental musical endeavors and local visual artists. Four mixed media artists are currently showing their stuff at the gallery.The owners decorated the lofty space sparingly with dried flowers and mismatched furniture to lend a sweetly dark bohemian feel. Colleen informed me that every Sunday evening the gallery holds improvised musical collaborations. You can follow artist links on the gallery's site to check out music hosted in the past. Some of the clips are industrial flavored; others are slower and moody/eerie. Fans can subscribe to receive the monthly recordings of the shows, or buy them individually online or at the gallery.
My viewing of the visual art show left me with a bunch of questions, so I harassed a couple of the mixed-media artists, who kindly offered some insight into their inspiration and work.
Rheytchul Chicken Bone's salon-style positioning of her paintings resembles a wall of family portraits in a medley of frames. Her art is as enigmatically named as she is (her best friend coined the nickname, which stuck), and I had been oscillating between whether the titles were non-sequiturs or some private association. Turns out the latter is true. "A lot of my titles come from lines of songs, lines of poems, movie quotes, inside jokes," says the painter, picture-framer, and counter-girl at Ultimate Tattoo and Piercing.
Of her mixed-media surface for the paintings, she explains, "I like to use fabric and texture to help build a narrative of the subject, to almost give them a setting, without actually doing so. Just enough to evoke a feeling in the viewer, albeit one that is unsettling, comedic, bland, or assertive." The tones that I lifted from many of them were haunting (the figure in "It Tastes Better than the Truth" has a ghostly countenance and unsettling stare enhanced by pinpoint highlights in the eyes), or cheeky ("Coney Island Baby"), or forlorn ("Dreams of Truckasaurus," a large image of a sad young girl with big eyes).
But Chicken Bone says that she sees a comedic quality in her work, despite the darkness. "A few I intentionally painted a bit moodier, a bit prettier, a bit more tragic, hopeful, etc." Her subjects vary from "old photographs and magazines as a starting reference point" to "Bob Flanagan, Charles Bukowski, and my grandfather."
You can see more of her work in "Portraits: Our Town and Our People" at the Center at High Falls.
Metal artist R. Scott Oliver contributed three minimalist pieces to the group show: rusted, yet smooth, metal surfaces stained with paint to give them an urban, silenced-industrial feel. The center of "Green Square" is dominated by the simple dark green form. This sparseness is atypical of his other wall sculptures (see more at rscottoliver.com), which are characterized by little reliquary-like shelves, complete with objects, or script scrawled allover.
Owner Jeremy Dziedzic shows you what can be done with only recycled book pages, white paint, and black ink. His nightmares-for-sale "Sketchbook" series (001-005) are old, faded pages with tables and charts, superimposed by Dziedzic's highly detailed grotesque anatomy sketches of beasties and truncated body parts ("Sketchbook 001" is dominated by a long-necked human skeleton that seems about to turn to face the viewer), topped off with obsessive scribbling of words in a dark-thought rush.
Kurt Ketchum, of SMUV (single-minded-urban-vision) Brand, creates art of spray-painted stenciling, drawing, and painting on corrugated cardboard or plywood. The pieces are black and white with brightly colored accents, and mostly abstractions of mechanical things and animals. Part L337 ("g33k-speak"; numbers stand in for letters) and part graffiti, they are a bit cartoony and skater-esque. The self-described "garden variety visual junkie" pulls inspiration from found objects, old graphics, paintings, album covers, new graphics, old buildings, nature, color, numbers, and letters.
"AFRO-AM" resembles a saber-tooth whale, and evokes Pacific Native American art. "3TRN54MR5" looked at first like linked pod houses, but translate the name to ‘three transformers' and you can detect them. The subject of "1AM-W" is little more than a helmet and feet.
Ketchum's unique style has caught the attention of some rather big clients; his two favorite commercial projects were for EXPN X-Games and Gravis, of which he says, "the boardsport and the lifestyle industries that evolved from that culture have always provided a great canvas for artists to express themselves."
Despite success, the commercial work, "leaves more to be desired" for Ketchum. "I have always had a burning desire to make stuff on my own. I guess I like the process of experimenting with materials and bringing order to chaos in a sense." He names "constant evolution" as his artistic goal: "I have just recently been able to use the gallery as a way to study my own work and make decisions and adjustments to improve it to fit my inner vision."
All of the artists' work plays nice with one another, though Ketchum's playful work lacks the ominous tone that the others' conveyed so strongly. Which is why I wasn't surprised when he answered my questions like an enthusiastic wonderer: "I am using my work to document and further my limited personal understandings of the ways of the universe and the power of the human spirit. If nothing else I am guaranteed a good lesson in patience and humility." You can see more of Ketchum's work at smuvcentral.com and altpick.com/kurtketchum.
ReMixed
Through January 3
Potential Life Studios, 34 Elton St
770-0149, potentiallifestudios.com
Thu 3-5 p.m., Fri & Sun 6-9 p.m., by appointment
