Steve Gerberich, Best of Springs, Sprockets, and Pulleys
Robert Dugreiner, Handle with Care
Roz Chast, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant
Brattleboro Museum
and Art Center through September 24, 2018
Not many people think of Brattleboro, Vermont, when they
think of art museums. After all, it’s a small venue—only five galleries—located
in a town of just 12,000 people that’s 100 miles from Boston and 200 from New
York. Sometimes it’s a good thing to have some distance between you and the art
establishment. The Brattleboro Museum and Art Center (BMAC) often launches
creative exhibits that are not the sort you’d find elsewhere. This summer it
has three strong shows.
The star of the summer is Steve Gerberich, an Iowan who has an eye for what he can do with
small motors, cast off objects, a vivid imagination, and an offbeat sense of
humor. He says his whimsical assemblages are equal doses of Joseph Cornell, Marcel
Duchamp, Alexander Calder, Robert Rauschenberg, and Jean Tinguely, but somehow
I think he forgot to mention Rube Goldberg. It takes a creative mind to find a
personified plastic mouse, fit it back-to-the-viewer in a box, and then imagine
metal tea strainers as cat faces that move back and forth as a rodent’s worst
nightmare—even if he is conducting the orchestra!
“Cash Cow” (1990) is funnier still, a wood, bicycle, and
hide body—the bovine sporting sneakers instead of hooves—plus various gears,
levers, musical instruments, and machine parts slapped together to create a
surrealistic milking machine. In other pieces he uses teapots for heads,
lampshades for hats, broom bristles for hair, and machine parts for noses to
create everything from the world’s strangest-looking rock band to machines that
do nothing but still manage to fascinate. Gerberich is just a lot of fun. His
kinetic sculptures are where engineering, artistic vision, and boyhood wonder
collide. You will smile your way through this exhibit. That is, whenever you’re
not exclaiming, “This is so cool!”
In “Handle With Care,” Robert
DuGrenier juxtaposes glass and objects to create self-contradictory
combinations. For instance, his “In Case of Fire Break Glass” is a series of
metal hammerheads attached to glass handles. “Double Burner” is a gas oven grate
atop melted glass extruded below. A rusty can is shown with a milky substance
pouring forth—also glass. In his own way, DuGrenier is making small jokes á la
Gerberich. His are a bit more poignant, though, as a fire that swept away his
barn inspired them. In such situations we learn that not even “rugged”
implements such as hoes, rakes, and shovels emerge unscathed. On a more basic
level, though, mixing glass and metal invites the viewer to reconsider all
things prosaic. 
Humor has long been the stock and trade of Roz Chast, one of the best known of all
American cartoonists and graphic novelists. Her “Can’t We Talk About Something
More Pleasant” demonstrates the levity within the deeply tragic: the care for
elderly parents and their ultimate demise. The panels on display come from two sections
of her memoir: “The Beginning of the End” and “The End.” If you know anything
about Chast, you are aware that she had a complicated relationship with her
parents; on one hand, they drove her crazy, but on the other they provided an
endless supply of mirth and material. Some would classify Chast’s work as New
York Jewish humor. Although there is truth in that, her work transcends any
particular religious or cultural tradition. How many of us have, at some point,
shaken our heads when pondering how we
managed to come from that family? And
what is more commonplace than negotiating the communications and values gaps
that divides one generation from the next? Chast dares wonder if these haunt
from beyond the grave.
The BMAC has several other exhibits that, in my view, are
less successful. David Rios Ferreira creates
collage like illustrations in which botany, race, gender, and colonialism
intersect. Or, at least, that’s his aim. I see that, but only is glimpses. His
densely layered surfaces too often come across as chaotic mishmash that's like
a dinner entrée with too many ingredients. Maybe it was the obfuscatory statements
he made about his own work, maybe it was the overuse of earth tones, or maybe
it was that he tried to tick the box of every au courant oppression, but this exhibit never engaged me.
I enjoyed the vibrant colors in “Painting Time” by Debra Ramsay, but it’s hard to get past
the reality that this installation is simply strips of acrylic painted in bold
hues and strewn willy-nilly onto the floor of a small side gallery. The various
colors represent the four seasons. Conceptually, I like the idea of reducing
time’s passage to basic colors rolled onto strips suggestive of film stock. Mostly,
though, I saw only a pile of pleasant pigments. I would have been more enamored
of a video showing Ramsay rolling paint and talking about how we can “see” time
as flowing ribbons of color.
I zipped through “Terrestrial Vale” by Susan Macdonald, her silverpoint and graphite on paper look at
plants bedded down for winter. She produces spectral like renderings of
bundled-up plants and captures in spirit the fragility of living things as
winter settles in. I confess, however, that I have never warmed to the forms
Macdonald uses. To my eye—admittedly sharpened by photography—the images appear
sketchy and incomplete, as if they are black and white negatives waiting to be
printed.
But here’s the deal. Not even artists themselves like or
appreciate all art. What’s special about the BMCA is that it’s small enough
that visitors end up sampling things they’d otherwise not consider at all. I
applaud it for its diversity and its boldness. And who knows, maybe one day
I’ll come to appreciate silverpoint.
Rob Weir
No comments:
Post a Comment