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May 1, 2011

co-conspirators Finsen and Arkin

I think you will agree that GessoHead does not often try your patience by writing about her own doings. But this time she has made an exception because some of you just must have been curious about why she has gone silent for a month and honestly, why have a blog if one can’t toot one’s own trombone every once in a rare while? So, Gessohead will now switch from this annoying third person mode and fill you in on Ellyn Weiss's current project.

a bit of flotsam or maybe jetsam

I have been working for about 8 months on a collaborative project with Sondra Arkin and Susan Finsen for the Brentwood Arts Exchange @ Gateway Arts Center called Big Ideas. The Gateway Arts Center, which includes two galleries, over a dozen artists’ studios and teaching facilities, is the jewel of the Gateway Arts District, encompassing Mt. Rainier, Brentwood, North Brentwood and Hyattsville, MD, the corridor along Rhode Island Avenue just north of the DC line. (There is a separate town about every 400 yards up here. Don’t know why. Maybe it’s like Europe where every country felt that it had to have a seaport. Maybe it’s some unique artifact of PG County historical geopolitics. Maybe someone could tell me?)

more shards

its in there - let it out!

About 18 months ago, while the space was still under construction, we saw the large gallery with its expanse of high-ceilinged interior volume and walls quite a bit longer than the typical commercial gallery. I was feeling unpleasantly unmoored by the closing a few months earlier of Sondra’s and my long-time gallery, Nevin Kelly and was looking for ways to assert some control over my career and take some risks. As it happens, both Sondra and Susan were, for their own reasons, also in the market for challenge. Our proposal for Big Ideas envisioned a large collaborative central installation from the floor to the ceiling with an interactive element. It would be surrounded by wall-hung work by each of us that was both a reflection and a source of generation for the imagery of the installation, called Community Spirit. Since none of us had made significant three-dimensional work previously, this exhibit would require us to expand our visual and conceptual vocabularies in scale and to move them off of the wall.

that's one high ceiling

We began meeting weekly to try to approach some common vision of the installation. There was lots of coffee and talk, some conceptual drawings, the sharing of references to the work of some favorite artists, but still the lingering doubt that we were each actually “seeing” the same thing in our mind’s eyes, or if we were seeing anything concrete enough to execute at all. After some 6 weeks or so of this, we reached a fateful decision; we would stop trying to plan it all in advance and begin to play together with various materials, hoping that a more concrete shared vision would emerge in this way.

We learned that we share an affinity for materials with a sort of arcane industrial look that seem well used and aged. We were inspired by Community Forklift in Hyattsville, where renovators donate salvaged building materials from nails to sinks and they are sold at bargain prices to be recycled. Community Forklift not only provided us with our initial art materials, it embodies the spirit of renewal, re-use and rebirth of the Gateway District that we try to reflect in Community Spirit.

Fast forward through months of work together and in our separate studios, making elements of the piece. It became clear early on that the final shape and construction of the installation could not be determined until we actually got into the space, adding another level of contingency that alternately caused fear and exhilaration. On April 14, a couple of vanloads of stuff were delivered to the gallery in black plastic bags. At that point, a whole lot of uncertainty remained about the final product.

Over the course of the next 10 days, the three of us (with help from Ron Childers, Steven Strasser and Phil Davis) turned the stuff into art, if I do say so myself. We had one catastrophic failure, started again with a stronger structural element, moved perhaps surprisingly smoothly to consensus decisions and bridged our individual aesthetics. To me, the critical imperative of collaboration proved to be the ability of each collaborator to let go of the outcome, which to a surprising degree emerged from the process of manipulating the materials themselves.

16 feet of art

My contribution to the wall-hung work is a 16-foot-long mural which I made in the gallery from April 14 - May 2. My favorite part was talking to the people who came in while I was making it. It is the biggest piece I have ever made, out-distancing Cognitve Dissonance (in the Time Warner Building in NYC) and Twelve Linear Feet (in the District of Columbia City Hall, the Wilson Building) by 4 linear feet. Sondra has made some gorgeous new large-scale encaustics in a restrained palette that resonate amazingly well with the installation. Susan's exciting acrylic dyptics and tryptic bring energy and a dash of color to the mix.

So, it’s all done and the doors are open at the Gateway Arts Center, 3901 Rhode Island Ave, Brentwood, MD. The opening reception is Saturday, May 7, from 5 – 8. We will also be in the gallery on Saturday May 14, which is Open Studios day in Mt. Rainier and will be giving artists’ talks at 2 and 4 pm. Finally, there will be a panel discussion on Wednesday, June 1, 7 – 9 pm, featuring Jack Rasmussen, Director of the AU Art Museum at the Katzen Center; Claudia Rousseau, Professor of Art History at Montgomery Collage and art critic for the Gazette; and Welmoed Llanstra, curator of Public Art for Arlington County. The topic is “Walking Off the Cliff: The value of artistic risk-taking.” GessoHead will be moderating and no doubt doing some talking of her own. So be there!!

I can't forget to give a big whooping thanks to Alec Simpson and Phil Davis at the Gateway Arts Center/Brentwood Arts Exchange who gave us the chance to try out our ideas, were exceedingly generous with their time and help and never let us see it if they were worried about the outcome.

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