Word
and Hand
Autzen
Gallery
at Portland State University, 1824 SW Broadway,
725-5656.
Ends Dec. 15.
The Autzen Gallery
is on the second floor of the Neuberger building on the
corner of Southwest Broadway and Harrison Street.
The gallery is
open Mondays through Saturdays, at varying times each day.
Andrea, a college friend, once pulled an imaginary string
near my head and said, "Turn your brain off. Stop thinking,
it's Friday night." For Andrea, thinking was a task to be
completed between certain hours and not applied to leisure
time. So, I'm confident that she would have hated Word
and Hand, a group exhibition at PSU's Autzen Gallery,
where six writers were paired with six artists to exchange
and respond to each other's work. The completed pieces, alongside
entries from the participants' journals and photographic chronicles
of the works' transformations, make up the exhibition.
"We're interested in how people think about things," explains
Michelle Glazer, one of the experiment's organizers. "I
saw the show more as a process than a product."
Glazer, a published poet and writing teacher, met her fellow
organizer, Steve Tilden, while he was remodeling her house.
The two began discussing the nature of inspiration, the
artistic voice and creating in isolation. Their discussions
led to an exchange of work, which formulated the idea of
a collaboration through response. The project was so successful
for them that they decided to bring others into the mix.
The new participants are of varying ages, experience and
backgrounds. Tilden and Glazer randomly matched people,
using only intuition to decide the pairings. "We just felt
they'd like each other," says Tilden, a metal sculptor.
"But sometimes the best work can come from tension."
The exhibit is conceptual art at its best, with ideas filling
the gallery as much as images. Formal nude paintings mingle
with found-art installations and mixed-media abstractions.
A theme begins in a poem, changes in the piece of art next
to it and then changes again in the poem that follows. Along
with this obvious linear evolution--"longitudinal change,"
Tilden calls it--come variations and digressions. The exhibition
is like a Heideggerian Rubric's Cube, where every idea is
analyzed, considered, appreciated and carefully put in its
rightful place.
For people like my friend Andrea, Word and Hand
can become tedious, even frustrating, as the abundance of
information requires the audience's full engagement. Also,
viewers might not absorb everything after the first visit.
"When you go to openings, people have their backs turned
to the paintings, because they think they can see the art
again," Glazer says. "At our opening, people were crowded
in front of the displays, elbowing each other for room.
We were involving the audience."
As an example piece, artist Dave Rawls affixed part of
a label from a tin of Pacific Mandarin Oranges to a canvas
and drew squiggles with a grease pencil around it. Then
writer Paul Merchant responded with Three Poems for an
Exiled Mandarin. In turn, Rawls applied color and blue
paper to the canvas, maintaining the position of the label
and squiggles, which inspired Merchant to pen the poem The
Complexity of Water. In the painting's final incarnation,
Rawls rubbed white pastel over the entire piece and added
part of a spreadsheet. Responding, Merchant wrote Two
Thoughts and What Happened to Them. In the accompanying
journal entry, Rawls writes, "These poems from Paul are
such a gift. This connection exists here and nowhere else.
I don't think I have ever had a work evolve this slowly
and incubate this way."
While the project is about artistic consciousness, it is
also about creating with the help of others. "It's freeing
because you can stop being your only source of inspiration,"
Tilden says.
Glazer contends that the creators don't surrender their
autonomy by participating in the project. "People maintain
their own voices," she says, "but allow themselves to be
influenced."
The best example of this shared influence is in the collaboration
between Brian Gard and Erin MacLeod. It seems an unlikely
pair. Gard is an established, older writer, and MacLeod
is a dreadlocked 25-year-old whose own mother describes
her art as "creepy." Gard sent MacLeod a tidy little poem
about "a correct life" that "is about to start tumbling
down." MacLeod slapped a stiff school chair onto the wall,
with spikes protruding from the chair's seat while leg restraints
hang from the bottom. As the series progresses, MacLeod
ably conceptualizes and encapsulates the ideas in Gard's
constantly revised poem, but with different images and from
a totally new angle. One of MacLeod's journal entries reads,
"I need to understand the feelings I get from the poem...."
Glazer and Tilden are applying for grants to continue the
project with new artists, perhaps experimenting with crossings
of political and national lines. "The process avoids interpersonal
clashes," Tilden says, "and gets to the gut level, the human
level."
Nothing has been planned for the project's immediate future.
So, all of those who keep their brains switched on, make
time in the next two weeks to visit this most-appropriate
tribute to thinking.
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