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The
Fortress Self Under Siege Defenses. Humans create them for our vulnerable bodies and minds, and we build structures to help our psyches and physical selves feel safe. At the White Lotus Gallery, artists, cross-fertilizing among disciplines, enable art to stretch its boundaries and attain broader relevance as it cracks our defenses. UO art instructors Leon Johnson and Megan O'Connell founded Creative Material Group (CMG) on the premise that much would be gained from bringing artists from all disciplines together in a collaborative, experimental atmosphere.
Three CMG artists, Johnson, O'Connell and Justin Novak, found a venue in the White Lotus Gallery, one of the rare private galleries in Oregon that will step out of the conventional and dare in Eugene what might be less daring in New York or London. The gallery awarded the artists unusual freedom to set up "Discretionary Viewing," an exhibit that includes ceramics, paintings and wax tablets, works that explore defenses and speak to the frailties of the body, psyche and memory. The Rococo era fascinates Novak, a UO Associate Professor of ceramics. During this 18th-century period, exquisitely executed porcelain figurines from Sèvres (France) and Meissen (Germany) became the height of fashion at European courts. Most notable were the works of Etienne-Maurice Falconet and Johann Joachim Kändler. In the next 120 years, more than a thousand porcelain factories were founded in Europe, producing for the middle classes millions of mass produced figurines. Traditional figurines captured bucolic and idyllic moments and served as a vehicle for romantic ideals and status quo bourgeois ideology. Novak takes this historical genre and subverts its content and message while celebrating its form and stylistic vocabulary. His Disfigurine series of "ironic anti-figurines" trump expectations of perfection and nostalgia by replacing the smooth white glazed body of the traditional porcelain figurine, idealized and ultimately sterile, with the mottled and crackled surface of raku fired ceramic, further ruptured by flesh wounds and lacerations. "Whereas the figurine has historically represented the dominant culture's norms and ideals, the disfigurines aim to expose the damage inflicted by those very same expectations," writes Novak. On the shelf of a curio cabinet, a kneeling woman holds in her open palms two severed hands joined in prayer (Hands in Prayer). Another, holding a pair of scissors, opens up a seam along her lower arm (Scissors). Elsewhere, a couple gently fingers each other's wounds, which open like side pockets below their chests. With their elegant poses and tender gestures — even as they lick their wounds or probe deep into them with long fingers — Novak's figurines do retain lyricism and a dreamlike quality. Indeed, the figures themselves harbor a dreamy, half sad, half contemplative expression, which saves them from morbidity. "As an artist," Novak writes, "I try to navigate a fine line between the tasteful and the grotesque. It is in the haunting tension between the two that attraction and repulsion inhabit the same space; where 'taste' is perhaps suspended, and the politics of our aesthetics are laid bare."
Until now, Novak's work has been shown mostly in "white-cube galleries with white pedestals and white walls," usually in New York. "I'm very excited to show in a gallery that has antiques and furniture," Novak says, "because it's ideally suited to projecting domestic scenes, and most of my work ends up in the domestic setting of collectors' homes. To populate those cabinets as curio cabinets was very exciting to me. I love the way the White Lotus challenges our expectations of the gallery as neutral space." Novak's Curios series of smaller figurines was specifically designed for the White Lotus environment of curio cabinets, as was the Discretionary Objects collection of sculptural but functional slip cast objects, created in collaboration with graduate student Jennifer Woodin. These objects, says Novak, "reflect a longing for safety and security." Their forms and gilded inscriptions echo those in Johnson's and O'Connell's works. Megan O'Connell's "tablature," with its inscriptional lettering carved on handcast carved paper and covered with beeswax, possesses elegance. Designed for private spaces and featuring textual fragments, these tablets act as counterpoints to the epigraphs and official pronouncements of public inscriptions. Single words or phrases appearing on their own are linguistically decontextualized only to be visually recontextualized through their semantic link with Leon Johnson's pieces. Novak and Woodin's Moenia refers to defensive walls, as does Membrana, in a more biological way. Both relate to the concepts of O'Connell's Remov'd from, Contained by and Next to. O'Connell's ARX series repeats the fortress outlines that are the object of Johnson's paintings. Johnson's Fortress oil series paintings, with their flat, schematic quality, point to his background in graphic design. Their conceptual basis is Johnson's interpretation of aerial views of fortresses, with a strategic lack of right-angled corners, as "architectural terror-mouths" and "forms of fear." Johnson is by nature an eclectic multimedia artist who navigates fluidly between the visual arts, film and theater, and who designs and produces critically acclaimed intermedia communications, performances and events. He claims, "These paintings have been shadowing me over the last decade. They have been slowly and carefully defining the psychic parameters of engagement. Drawing up contracts and terms. I surrendered and signed. Named names. Gave up the ghosts." Eugeneans have few opportunities to view local contemporary art. The academic merit system favors national and international over local exhibits and performances. Compounding this is the understandable reluctance of commercial galleries to display works too unconventional to safely sell. This exhibit is therefore a unique occasion, not to be missed. "Discretionary Viewing" can be seen at the White Lotus Gallery through July 29.
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