Detritus

Before seeing Detritus, a group show at Soap Gallery curated by Lani Asher, I walked down Mission Street. Navigating the paper wrappers, dust, overflowing trash bins, and spilled food, I entered the gallery alert to smells, textures, and repellent images.  Many of the featured artists are from LA, a city long associated with excess consumption, pollution, and waste. All have a fascination with found, recycled, or hoarded material, sharing a pack rat mentality. There have been two other shows in the last year that dealt with detritus or garbage: “Beautiful/Decay” at the Kopeikin Gallery in West Hollywood, which just closed March 18, and “Garbage Picker! Contemporary Artist as Chiffonnier(e),” at Affirmation Arts in NY, on view last summer. A chiffonnier or chiffonniere is a rag picker, a person who sifts through the trash and re-sells useful materials. Chiffonnier(e)s were respected in the 19th century because they were self-employed and free thinking, considered practicing street philosophers. The artists in this show are collecting, organizing and transforming the garbage of the greater consumer culture as well as their own personal remnants. Reconsidered, reclaimed or repackaged “refuse” gains status just by being in the studio, becoming the nicer cleaner word: detritus.

Adele Crawford has sewn scary faces on her own baby photos.  One has to look through the broken, stitched line of a screaming adult face to see the child’s innocent one. Melding youth and maturity by integrating photography and sewing, the combined image could be a fast-forwarded view of someone growing up.  She uses images from her cache of family photographs to raise issue of respecting or protecting identity. Being both artist and subject, she is free to recycle her own image. She pierces her likeness with needle and thread, uniting destruction and construction into one gesture. Knowing that the child in the photograph is the artist diminishes any sense of mean-spiritedness or insensitivity the puncturing creates. Crawford’s work illustrates how old baby photos resonate with ownership, even if they are defaced or thrown away. However, sewing a bunny rabbit on a child’s full length portrait in the piece “And no one was ever alone again,” is less successful, as the addition injects extra sentiment into the child’s portrait, when none is needed.

Adele Crawford. And no one was ever alone again, 2008, mixed media.

Lani Asher constructs collages from bits of paintings, drawings, photographs, found paper, and print media. She works off her studio floor, assembling, tearing apart, and reassembling each piece according to a personal system of signs and symbols. The work includes images from Morocco, Mexico and Spain, of windows, doors, shops and odd objects that have a special significance for her. The surfaces are pervasively gritty or lint-encrusted. Asher primarily utilizes neutral grey tones along with occasional bits of added color. She creates physical, tactile, textured spaces by pressing and gluing this mess of materials together. The work possesses an air of longing associated with memory and past experiences. One senses that the pieces of the puzzle that are missing, those that have been edited out yet still have some bearing on the finished product.

Lani Asher. Nymphaeas, 2008, mixed media.

Anne M. Bray draws hoards of boxes, bags, computer equipment, odds and ends beyond anyone’s imagination. Her drawings are lovingly rendered, her line pure and serene, her procrastination cleaning the house justified. Bray’s drawings are a visual marker of how long she has been collecting stuff.  The artist seem to revel in the pleasure of accumulation as she creates yet another opportunity for consumption, the drawing itself. 

Ann M Bray. Porch Clutter, 2008, ink on paper.

Detritus is on view at Soap Gallery through March 28th.