Transitional Zonesfrom the Director by Ric Collier Click here to view the original (PDF) version of this article. Last spring, I was driving along a busy street on the west side of Salt Lake City and saw, growing out of a crack in the asphalt of the traffic island, a solitary red tulip. I admired its surprising beauty, its unlikely existence and its tenacity in the face of such odds. I didn't think more about it until a few days ago. At that time, I was a participant in the monthly Gallery Stroll, visiting a place called The Pickle Company, a multi-disciplinary art center housed in a vacated 1800's pickle factory in the Granary District southwest of downtown. In the past, this "alternative space" has hosted a variety of exhibitions, performances and workshops. On this occasion, one young curator and a group of six young artists had fabricated in various areas and "rooms" throughout the building, two separate exhibitions that probed and ignited - through evocative, individual installations - the personal memories and histories of those in attendance, including myself. To begin, The Pickle Company building itself is a rough and nervous warehouse space with a recent history of courageous inhabitants like Chicana artist Ruby Chacon, feminist theater and the like. It is a pretty edgy environment for art in an area of mixed industry, one of the city's transitional zones which welcomes various activities, most of them legal. The building seems to be a trapezoidal or oddly-shaped quadrilateral structure, which also contributes to a feeling of disorientation and some discomfort. On the ground floor, I entered We Are Woven, a collaborative installation by Allison Baar, Moey Nelson, Sherri Pauli, Jenni Lord, organized by Kenny Riches, former director of the Kayo Gallery. What seemed like a home within a house was a series of four or five distinct "rooms" created by this group of four dissimilar women, each with a unique history and story to explore. Clearly unified by feminine myth or feminist issues, the rooms were crammed with an eclectic collection of used furniture, old knickknacks, soiled lace, vintage photographs and an assortment of modified shelves, tables and window frames. At once confusing and intriguing, this amalgam of objects nonetheless suggested friendships, a sisterhood, family, nostalgia, hidden truths, anger, and home. This was art in the raw-blatant, aggressive, uncensored-with no personal limitations except the creators' own daring. Above all, it projected genuine and deliberate thought, a narrative clotted with emotion and energy and ambition and insight. Upstairs was Aerial, by David and Mathieu Ruhlman. This installation was equally profound but spare without being minimalist, rather like a series of sentences with long pauses in between. These brothers created areas more ritualistic and religious in feeling, without reference to any specific faith except the recurrent use of objects arranged in sets of three. Their work also suggested the notions of family with three beds and three walls, and repeated images of a mother with twins, like the Madonna and children. They had used just enough whitewash to unify their installation, though the original space kept its own character. Like a treasure hunt from an earlier life, I searched the strategically lighted space seeking answers in the maze of walls, a hanging tree, the living room sized projection animating one wall and the private windows begging me to peer inside the blue "reliquary"room. This project also had an unyielding sense of deliberateness and purpose, a cathartic "look into possession, loss and the attempt to overcome separation." Clearly, the work of these six individuals was not driven by an organization like TRASA Urban Arts Collective, but by the artists themselves. The show was about them and their highly personal work, not about a grant's stipulation or a sponsor's desires or an audience's expectations. This artwork existed completely on its own terms, full of important information, and without a single label, brochure or explanation. The work transcended history, context and all other superimposed meaning. It simply existed, with an independent life of its own, whether anyone saw it or not, whether anyone liked it or not. I left The Pickle Company with a sense of great hope, a sense of great joy and pride, that a group of young artists could have the confidence to create work dependent on soulful introspection, not external validation. What their installation lacked in craftsmanship, it more than made up in exuberance and authenticity. I had the same feeling when I encountered a group of minimal painters in Beijing working against the status quo of the socio-political figurative imagery of the Cultural Revolution or when I witnessed three ambitious artists in Seattle who had created a "park" on a flatbed trailer and moved it temporarily into neighborhoods without parks. I venture a guess that the history of art is filled with numerous artists who started this way, compelled by forces within and not by a perceived need for external affirmation or recognition. We go looking for what we think art is, and that's what we find. Constantly limited by our personal imaginations, definitions, strictures and structures, we try to "fit" what we find into what we mean by "art." But so much real art, original and rambunctious, has nothing to do with institutions or the media or scholarship or criticism, valuable as those might be. Instead, we should be aware of and support and encourage what's happening at places like The Pickle Company, the Nobrow Coffee and Tea Company, the former Unknown Gallery, Kenny Riches' old Kayo Gallery-places that operate outside our usual social, academic and aesthetic environments. We should all be aware that this kind of artistic activity is happening. There is a cadre out there of young people who are exploring, operating on themselves and the community. We have lessons to learn from these people, to persevere without the comforts of money, artists' grants, uptown studios, or even a reliable exhibition space. If anything, the museums, galleries and the Art Center should be influenced by them, not vice versa. At the Salt Lake Art Center, we have been celebrating our first 75 years all year. Now it's time to celebrate the future, to remain open to experiences like that provided by The Pickle Company in our midst. This art is growing up as good, new art does: like that wild tulip, surrounded by heavy traffic, essentially ignored, yet managing to maintain its own unexpected, charming and tenacious identity. To encourage them is to sustain an entire garden of wild tulips on the asphalt traffic islands on which they take such defiant, remarkable root. |