ArtOpticon.us


In the early twentieth century, with the advent of Cubism and Dadaism, nontraditional materials—that is, vernacular and even perishable materials, usually considered as inherently worthless—began to invade modernist art. The illusionist depiction of reality, mastered over almost five centuries, was superseded by a new vision of art: one more experimental in form and feeling, and more challenging to the viewer, who was asked to interpret collages and constructions made of humble materials lacking the ‘noble’ glamor of bronze, marble and oil paint.

The Poetry of Wood brings together eleven wall-mounted assemblages by Alex Garcia and twelve drawings and paintings by Catherine Mackey. Both San Francisco artists have architectural training and share a contemporary recycle/reuse/repurpose ethic, and each explores wood as motif and material, revealing the hidden poetry of old buildings; they are visual archaeologists or paleontologists.

Mackey juxtaposes her views of weathered barns—some realistic, others more expressionist—with swatches of collaged text from tattered old street posters, imagining their lost glory days; the effect is reminiscent of the words emerging from Cubist and Futurist paintings depicting the sensory overload of modern life (circa 1915).   “Lemmon Canyon-Weathered Grays” and “Pasquetti—Aged Ochres” are oil-on-panel portraits of dilapidated barns,  stable triangular structures despite their missing planks, depicted in elevation view, straight-on and  sideways, from a distance, in the Bernd and Hilla Becher style, but with the bright color accents from the collaged text elements lending a contrasting festive note. More dramatic are the two “Vishi Barn Collapse” works on paper, with their impenetrable gray-brown tangles of beams, posts and planks suggesting shipwreck, explosion, or implosion. More abstract are the colorful squashed buildings in “Beautiful Annihilation” (the creative destruction of the economists) and “Sinking into a Soft Caul of Forgetfulness,” its title adapted from Sylvia Plath’s poem on the onset of sleep and winter, “Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond.”  

Garcia salvages fragments from collapsing ranch buildings in West Marin into elegant, semi-abstract constructions that will live on, sheltered, indoors, in viewers’ imaginations—perhaps accompanied by the reclaimed-wood furniture that the artist has made for twenty years. While some the wall-mounted sculptures retain their original rectangular shapes, though carved by the artist, others suggest pictures and narratives (albeit mysterious, playful ones, as in Klee, Kandinsky and Ernst). “Emancipation” is a small wooden panel to which steel rods have been affixed, suggesting a teepee tripod rising from the black arc of the earth into a vivid deep pink sky; a handful of rungs spanning two of the poles suggests a rickety ladder and a short-lived freedom. “That Tree on the Hill” is a spindly array of metal rods that suggests only the most nominal of trees—or old television aerials. “Tale of a Whale” is an assemblage composed of two weathered boards, one suggesting a stylized whale, and the other a ship (or the whale’s lower jaw), with the pieces connected by metal rods that read as teeth or harpoons in this fish story. “Orbiting the Green Planet” and “Arrival” are evocative small abstract landscapes (made with the assistance of the late Beto Toscano) composed of a various textures and colors of found wood—counterpane countries for tiny denizens.

Mackey’s expressionist architectural views and Garcia’s intuitive, elegant fabrications (in both senses of the word) are complementary, and well paired: a vanishing past and an imaginary future are caught and preserved in, by, and for the evanescent present.

—DEWITT CHENG