Margaret Roleke at Odetta Gallery in Brooklyn

"Gobsmacked!" is the title of the exhibition currently showing until October 5th at the beautiful new Odetta Gallery, 229 Cook Street, Brooklyn. This show features large, rich charcoal drawings depicting visions of psychological topographies by Charlotte Schulz and bricolage works by Margaret Roleke. Both artists create work that addresses the political and cultural state of the world without being didactic or conveying a directly gobsmacked attitude at the horrors and inequities of life on planet earth.

Margaret Roleke, Fairytale Western, 2013, 38" x 38" x 5"

Margaret Roleke's work certainly fits the definition of "bricolage," and she achieves a considerable amount of dimension in some of her wall works by using plastic objects such as palm trees, buildings and animals that protrude off the panel. Most of Roleke's works in "Gobsmacked!" are painted a single unifying color that brings together such disparate plastic toys as horses, wagon wheels, soldiers, spacemen, cowboys, guns, rocket ships, houses, canoes and canons - to name just a few. 

Fairytale Western, side view

Fairytale Western, extreme closeup

Roleke wants to emphasize the difference between "girl toys" and "boy toys" by challenging the genderized assumptions we give to the toys themselves as well as by applying the "girl color" of pink to cowboys, Indians, horses and Western what-alls that are assumed to be playthings for boys.

I thought that Margaret Roleke made effective use of the materials she chose and coating the plastic toys with paint in one color subdued their plasticity with a reductive palette. In a way, however, there is something about the garish colors common to so many in toys that makes the toys uniquely other worldly and sets them apart from other plastic objects. These gaudy colors are thought to be attractive to children and to their parents. There is also the distinctive processed petroleum odor emanating from so much plastic in a confined area. You will get a whiff of this if you go near a toy department at Target or some other store and you will know the Girl Aisle by that garish plastic pink that falls somewhere between magenta and hell.


Toys on a Disney Image
Another panel work, "Tink's Army," uses plastic soldiers mounted on  fabric that portrays a Disney character - Tinker Bell in this case - looking almost like a world map at first glance. I liked the way the arrangement of military toys distorted and almost hid the figure underneath.

Margaret Roleke, "Tink's Army," 2013, 30" x 30" x 3", plastic toys on fabric

Of course the idea of sweet, voiceless little Tinker Bell having an army is an idea that jars the mind. Roleke wants to point out that the the vision of this little fairy wearing an ultra-short dress and acting coquettish (or what Disney describes as "Sassy, Fashionable and Creative,") is a sexualized vision thought to be an acceptable character for children. Are we willing to accept the flirtatious Tinker Bell and not the war-mongering one? Does war belong to boys and fashion to girls?


Black Barbie, Black Guns
The color black (an all time favorite of mine) carries its own tone or connotation - not of gender, but of meaning and associations - mourning, fashion, absence, threat, foreboding. In the center of Odetta Gallery is a spiderish hanging work by Roleke painted a dense matte black. Only when you view it closely can you distinguish its various components: guns, soldiers and Barbies - many of the Barbies separated from their heads.

Margaret Roleke, "Hanging," 2014, painted toys, 76" x 76" x 30"

Here Roleke co-mingles girl toys and boy toys, uniting them in a fashionable but mournful coat of dense black. This strange combination of headless Barbies (with plenty of unattached hairy heads), guns, and soldiers all suspended in the gallery's center makes me think about what we give children to play with and how this forms their vision of male-female relationships and human interaction. Kind of a ghastly thought that we are perpetuating the sex and guns culture now destroying the world in various ways. All we need to add to this mix is some cold, hard cash to really portray adult reality.


Chinese firecrackers
What looked to me  at a distance like strings of Chinese firecrackers turned out to be colorful plastic shotgun shell casings. Who knew that bullets came packaged so attractively? Roleke has wired empty casings together in long, bead-like strings, and they are hung on the wall at Odetta in a mass reminiscent of Mardi Gras beads or Anatsui's metallic hangings.

Margaret Roleke, Shells #2, 2014, wall sculpture, site specific,
 spent shells and wire, 89" x 58" x 17"

Close-up of plastic shell casings

That these bullet castoffs carry printed names such as "Top Gun" attests to the cultural messaging inherent in our gun-happy culture. You, too, can be Tom Cruise in an elite group of expert marksmen if you use the right brand of ammunition when you are plugging away at a target, a live animal or who knows what or whom. This is branding at its finest.


Odetta Gallery
Finding such a beautiful, Chelsea-ish storefront gallery in the midst of grungy Bushwick is a lovely surprise.  Created and operated by artist Ellen Hackl Fagan, Odetta is a new gallery that plans to show contemporary works "focusing on Color Theory, Minimalism, Glyphs, Buddha Mind, Fluxus, History, Humor, Psychedelia, Ephemera, Science, Math and Music." Be sure to visit!

The front of Odetta Gallery listing a show earlier this year

Bricolage All Around Me

Do artists see differently than other people? I think they do, and I think it's because they have trained their eyes to zero in on particular elements in their surroundings to replicate the focus they use in creating their work. So, a portrait painter may be attracted by the way light strikes the side of someone's face, sculptors may see a form in nature that leads to a new work, and abstract artists may be fascinated by the arrangement of windows on a building or a particular color. Personally, I see bricolage. (not dead people).

Sculpture by James Kitchen

James Kitchen
So I'm walking by the courthouse in Northampton the other afternoon and out front on the lawn is not the Civil War cannon you might expect but a "cannon" made by Chesterfield sculptor James Kitchen from found metal pieces. I have seen Kitchen's work before and have been impressed with his skill in combining the pieces into works that look cohesively like sculpture rather than a pile of metal parts put together. (Be sure to click pix to enlarge.)

Another work on the courthouse lawn

Kitchen was not trained as an artist and makes these sculptures as an avocation, although one to which he devotes a lot of time and thought. He often shows his work around the Pioneer Valley in western Massachusetts and his works range from sort of petite to the fairly monumental in scale. You can read more about him here. He has a great eye and has apparently developed his expertise through experience. I believe that he also unifies his work by applying a patina so that all the pieces are brought together by color.

(Unfortunately, I don't have the titles of these works and did not see them on Kitchen's website.)

OK, I'm Defensive About My Cluelessness
The reason I bring up this business of how artists see is that I'm a little sensitive about what I personally see as I move through the world. I have had the experience of not realizing, until it was pointed out to me by someone close to me (guess who?), that a guy I had seen and spoken to at the studio for a few months had a full beard. I hadn't even logged it in as being part of his face. Why? Don't know. Does not compute. I also have the bad habit of just looking at the expressions on people's faces and not at their clothing, new shoes or the fact that they are missing a limb. (This really happened yesterday, although in my defense I only saw this person from the side and back, not the front. Would I have noticed if I saw all of her? Only if I had really looked, I guess, and I was occupied with something else.)

Anyway, I'm blaming my lack of observation on the fact that as my eyes range through the world, I notice things differently than other people. Now wouldn't it be dull if we all saw the same things?

Sally Curcio
I did happen to notice the work of another artist out here in western Massachusetts whose work could be classified as bricolage. That artist is Sally Curcio. I have seen her work in a couple of shows and wouldn't have pegged it as bricolage until I started thinking about bricolage as a particular form. I was reading in the Northampton newspaper about a show she was in and the description of a particular work rang the bricolage BOING bell in my mind. When I went to her website, I discovered that she made lots of work using found materials. Unlike most bricolage, her work has a rather Minimalist aesthetic that is very elegant and streamlined as well as understatedly humorous- so take a look.

Sally Curcio, Petite Prosthetic Sinistral and Dextral (diptych), 2005
Doll arms on mat board, 11 3/8" x 40 3/8" each

You see that I'm relating to my previous concentration in this blog on that American icon, Barbie. Although one might be hard pressed to identify the specifically Barbie arms in this diptych.

The next image contains elements that should also be familiar to many readers of this blog.

Sally Curcio, Color Studies, 2005, Wall paint color samples on mat board,
16 1/2" x 16 1/2" each

Next two pieces having to do with eyes:

Sally Curcio, Eye Candy, 2005, Button candy on paper that
spells out "eyecandy" in Braille, 17" x 16 1/2" (Note that the candy
is mounted under glass so that the braille can't be read)

Sally Curcio, I of the Beholder, 2007,
Mirror, clay, fake pearls, false eyelashes and velvet
24" x 18" x 13"

And finally a piece that relates to work by one of my heroes, El Anatsui.

Sally Curcio, Bottle Caps, 2007
Assorted bottle caps on painted panels, 6' x 10'

Bottle Caps detail

Curcio had a  statement on the page with her Bottle Caps piece that delves into some of the reasons for using found objects. I have some disagreements with her statement, but I'll tell you about them after you read what she had to say:

The installation “Bottle Caps” consists of over 1400 bottle caps that were collected from friends, anonymous donations, my trash, and from visits to the recycling center. The bottle caps are glued to a 6’ x 10’ array of panels.

After their short functional life, bottle caps become garbage. This work resurrects these throw-aways as an artistic medium. The work engages in the most basic and powerful trick of magic and religion: transubstantiation.

This assemblage attempts to evoke our innate fascination with categorizing and collecting, and our bent to be connoisseurs. This collection comically summons this impulse into action. The works offers, in a self-consciously naïve way, the self-satisfaction of collecting a “complete” or “large” set of objects, and the need for recognition in publicly displaying this triumph. The process of collecting, organizing, and display is a ritual that attempts to create an oasis of certainty, order, and self-identity.

This composition deliberately confronts the observer with a kind of alien and obsessive attention to precision and order suggesting an unconscious urgency. This translates positively into art that evokes the simplicity and “cleanness” of minimalism, the brightness of op art, and the innocence of folk art. The sundry shapes and patterns are simple and satisfying, the colors are bright, the format neat, and the materials familiar and everyday, albeit re-contextualized. With this work I try to speak to our perpetual drive to somehow, in some way, perhaps even in an outlandish way, try take control and make sense of things.     Sally Curcio (from her website)

Although I agree with much of what she says, I think that in her second paragraph describes what the real task of an artist is in making a bricolage work. She calls it "transubstantiation," but that seems to be a term used exclusively by Roman Catholics to describe the conversion of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.

I believe what she's talking about is transformation, the transformation of found, readymade, recycled or invented elements into a work of art. I don't mean to be critical, but I don't think the rest of her statement really gets at what using found objects brings to a bricolage work, and actually seems to rationalize why she uses the found objects. I think no excuses need to be made for using found objects because those objects have an identity which is subsumed into the bricolage work and which enriches the new work. Suppressing the individual identities of the objects is the goal of the bricolage work. So it's like having your cake and eating it too. You see the work as something new but if you focus on the parts, you see the old. You might just call it having bricolage eyes.

Barbie Strikes Again

See the link below for info on the artist who made this great brooch

No, "bricolage" is not a synonym for Barbie dismemberment, but the link that Karen Frazer posted on Facebook was just too good to pass up. Take a look at this http://www.ecouterre.com/artist-dismembers-barbie-turns-body-parts-into-disturbing-jewelry/barbie-mouth-brooch/ . This jewelry is very well done because you wouldn't recognize it as Barbie parts right away. But once you see it for what it is, there's a whole other level of meaning.

The whole trick is making it your own. Yes, that's right: take it away from Barbie (and/or Ken) and make it yours.

You can tell that Barbie was popular before the era of Botoxed lips

Thanks for thinking of me, Karen!

Barbie Mania

I just came across this post from Hyperallergic that shows what could be done if one had the commitment to Barbie that some believe she deserves. Why Barbie? you may ask. Well, if you had opened your own mystery box, you might know the answer to that question. And some who did wanted to reinvent Barbie in new ways, one might even say deconstruct, but no names, please.