Strange wallpaper; champagne, chocolate, Charbonnet
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
By Henry Sweets
Jackson Hole, Wyo.-At Teton Artlab’s last show, “Wallpaper,” the walls were covered, floor to ceiling, with works on paper.
And thirty or so drawings of ghoulish, mythical subjects, but also steeped in pop-culture chinked the space in between the other work. Men with four arms, and dudes in Oakland caps whose faces were sheathed in feathery shag, peppered the show.
The drawings, by Ben Carlson, had an aesthetic that caught the eyes of my friends and I as we circled the gallery. They had a posture and mystique that was appealing and approachable, but we all had a hard time explaining why.
His journal, on sale for $1 million, was pinned open to a page where eight or nine tribal faces appeared to be prepared for a mystical ceremony. It looked like an entry from Indiana Jones’ notebooks: full of cryptic drawings that give directions to buried treasure, or describe the people who guard it.
But Carlson is unearthing foreign symbols and tribal ideas in a quest for new ways of living, not for buried treasure.
It is a high-minded approach to art that hopefully, advocates for social change. A self-aware art also aware of dialogues it hopes to initiate, it accepts that any dialogue, or any reaction, is a success.
“I see those characters as instigation for me to learn about other cultures and to experiment with that,” Carlson said. “It pushes me to live more vivaciously, I guess. And I hope people look at them and get something out of them, in terms of instigation for them too.”
When I asked about Carlson’s work in a national context, he noted that art these days often talks about survival, and solutions for living that recover something lost. As old ideas fail, he said, people must come together to find new ones. Carlson’s art reaches to the past and to other cultures to synthesize solutions for living, or imply them, by juxtaposing their symbolism with that of ours.
“Artists are creating new visions of how they want to live,” he said. “It’s kind of like them talking about how they’re going to preserve their culture, but they’re also kind of inventing their culture, like what may be in the future. Inventing post-apocalyptic characters and new ways to live. Pushing what our culture might become.”
But part of his theory is that “troops and tribes, cultures and collectives” will form to advance our new culture. The Artlab, he said, was a platform for dialogue that happened nowhere else.
But as long as “whatever rent payments” last, Carlson said, he will be in the Artlab, “making stuff.” Feel free to stop by 135 N. Cache and check him out. His ideas are also on
www.carlsoncollective.com.
Most recently he has been collaging American flags out of topographic maps and other found paper; an exploration of how Americans can focus the positive aspects of their country, instead of being jaded on the current political system and shut off from new ideas because of it.
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Mmmm… champagne and chocolate.
Celebrate life at the Muse Gallery for the opening of Nichole Charbonnet’s show of new paintings called “Heros and Avatars”.
Contemplate Americans’ worship of pop culture symbols while you ironically taste icons of decadence.
A sprinting batman, a 1940’s couple French-kissing and an alert deer are among the subjects of her time-torn paintings.
An avatar is an incarnation or an embodiment of a divine power. It is derived from a Sanskrit word avatari describing the descent of a god to earth. It has now become known as the picture that goes next to your screen name when you navigate chat rooms, bulletin boards and blogs on the Internet.
And we all know what a hero is, but we might not know that it descends from the Greek word that meant demigod. That means half-god.
By selecting these comic book heroes, animals, and symbols of American romance, Charbonnet is questioning not only what American culture values, but what it worships – or used to worship.
Painted on a surface that has been prepared to look old, the avatars have certainly “fallen” from grace.
I like the show, but I just wish the whole show wasn’t blue. It is faded blue, like faded blue-jean blue. The paintings look like a piece of paper that went through the wash.
And art worn down by time strikes a chord these days, but a more potent aesthetic statement comes from the faded brightness found in only a couple of Charbonnet’s paintings; those are a faded bright orange and yellow. PJH
‘Bull Mask’ Ink on Paper by Ben Carlson
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Strange wallpaper; champagne, chocolate, Charbonnet | Planet JH News Article: Arts Beat
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