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 REVIEW Unfamiliar Territory Joseph Biel and Richard Kraft use disparate objects and fragments of images to question authority and accepted modes of living. BY KATE BONANSINGA |
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Draft of a Landscape Marylhurst University, Art Gym, 17600 Highway 43, Marylhurst, 636-8141. Ends March 28. Draft of a Landscape is like Alice's Wonderland, with unusual juxtapositions and sudden shifts in scale. The installation occupies the three gallery spaces of Marylhurst's Art Gym, which together encompass 2,700 square feet. In the back corner of the largest gallery stands a statue of a blue soldier, too small to be life-sized and too big to be toy-like, pointing at a dust-covered staircase that extends from the floor to the center of the wall. Nearby, grass grows in an open wooden box, and a full-sized bed hangs from the wall. As a viewer I feel disoriented--like Lewis Carroll's Alice--as though I had slid down the 30-foot metal chute that drops from a projection box high above the floor. In the current context it represents an unreachable place where, I imagine, everyday life continues. Photo transparencies of strangely familiar European men and women with hairstyles and clothing from bygone, affluent eras fill the multiple panes of the gallery's two arched windows. Aloof and confident, they stare at me from the outside world as I attempt to make sense of the disparate objects around me. There are many to try to make sense of. In the entry to the main space hangs a knee-high shelf supporting a mound of unfired clay; far above it is the spout of a bathtub faucet. Across from this, a long shelf hangs so high that the mounds of salt resting on it are almost out of sight, and on the adjacent wall is a trophy elk with gorgeous, full antlers and soft brown eyes. Just around the corner is the entrance to the rest of the exhibit, with more incongruous elements. There's an oil painting of a monkey; an empty orange school chair on a pile of charcoal; a sculpture of a hand holding a penis; a wall of books stacked with their spines facing away from the viewer, their titles and subjects unknown. This environment is as carefully composed and unusual as those of surrealist paintings. The only unresolved element in this "draft" is perhaps the most important: The viewer as participant, another element in this landscape. One of Joseph Biel and Richard Kraft's greatest talents as a team is for evoking an individual response from each person who enters their installations. To me, Draft reveals the vulnerability of authority, traditionally associated with the male and symbolized here by the elk, the penis, the soldier. European imperialism condones the acquisition of property and hence of economic power. But what if the parceled land should no longer bear fruit, the boxed-in grass turn brown and dormant? What if our textbooks ring hollow, our teachers speak untruths, our histories prove to be nonlinear? The staircase to success may lead nowhere; the ascension to the throne may be an empty pursuit; accumulated goods may disappear, like soft clay under running water, or be precious and under-utilized, like piles of salt on an unreachable shelf. Biel was trained as a painter and has also done performance works, including last summer's Yellowman ("Yellowman Speaks," WW, July 1, 1998). Kraft is the chair of the department of photography at Pacific Northwest College of Art. Together they have been creating monumental, collaborative installations for several years. In their last Portland exhibition, in 1996, historical photographs, the artists' own photographs, rocks, handwritten correspondence and articles of clothing covered the floors and walls of Quartersaw Gallery in a poignant reflection on the experience of a Holocaust survivor. The installation was not about war or oppression but rather about the value of freedom and the importance of political and creative liberty. Draft is their largest installation to date. It is also their sparest and, not coincidentally, their most successful. In addition to the main gallery, it also encompasses two smaller spaces. In one, the walls are covered, floor to ceiling, with a grid of black-and-white photographs; they show fragments of texts, landscapes and figures from past and present. In another there is a triptych of two-inch-high video screens with images from everyday life. Here, as throughout the exhibit, by placing objects outside of their usual contexts and portraying fragments of situations, the artists ask us to reevaluate accepted ways of living and to create new landscapes.
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