Art Parts

Newspapers are going out of business almost faster than anyone can
read them.

As Tucsonans are all too aware, the Tucson Citizen,
publishing in one form or another since 1870, stopped the presses on
May 16. This past Sunday, The New York Times Magazine reported that Philadelphia—my hometown!—might become the
first big American city with no daily newspapers at all. The
Inquirer, once a routine winner of Pulitzer Prizes, may not
survive its current bankruptcy proceedings.

Readers may be fleeing newspapers for the 24/7 Web, but Nick
Georgiou still has a use for the old rags. The New York artist takes
old-fashioned newsprint—covered with yesterday’s news—and
turns it into paper sculptures.

A Big Apple sculptor and filmmaker, Georgiou was in the Old Pueblo
as a visiting professor at the UA this spring, when the Citizen closed. He pays an homage—of sorts—to the old journal in a
piece now on view in Tohono Chul’s Re-Visions: Art Made From
Reclaimed Materials.

His “Citizen K” is a shaggy dog made entirely out of newspapers
chopped up into bits. Neatly sliced and carved, the paper squares are
positioned vertically all over the dog’s 3-foot-tall body. They make
for a bristly coat of fur—and a punk-rock pompadour on the head.
The K-9’s big round eyes are fashioned from pages rolled up into
cylinders, the kind that dog owners use to smack the nose of an unruly
Spot or Rover. “Citizen K,” it must be said, is one homely dog.

Another Georgiou work, “Desert Seeds,” is prettier, but it, too, is
composed of an antediluvian medium: books. Likewise chopped up into
small squares, the books’ pages are arranged inside a shallow wooden
case, which is hung on the wall like a painting. The darker pages,
turned ocher from age, form a pattern against the lighter ones. The
yellowed papers vaguely resemble a sprouting plant—a new life,
perhaps, arising from the wreckage of the old medium.

“Newspapers and books are ideal source material, because they
already tell stories,” Georgiou writes in an artist’s statement. “The
regeneration of the printed word into another form—turning a book
or newspaper into a sculpture—is a way of breathing new life into
it.”

Whether newspapers themselves will have a new life, we don’t know as
yet. The canine piece suggests, not unkindly, that it’s past the time
to teach the old media dogs new tricks. Otherwise, newspapers and books
risk becoming static, works in a gallery like Georgiou’s, relics of the
past.

Georgiou is the lone outsider in a group of 31 selected for this
fourth Tohono Chul art-from-recycled-objects show. The artists, the
rest of them local, take stuff that nobody else seems to want and,
following the lead of such artists as Joseph Cornell, turn them into
inventive art. Besides newspapers, their materials include old sweaters
(Karen Lukacs), grocery produce stickers (Joan Davidson), metal car
insignia (Rand Carlson), postage stamps (Barbara Brandel) and bicycle
parts (Kenneth Armstrong, Troy Neiman).

Put together by assistant curator Peggy Hazard, the exhibition is
always a reminder of how much we needlessly throw away. All the artists
deliver an environmental subtext, but for the most part, their cleverly
crafted mixed-media pieces are more playful than preachy.

Royce Davenport, an old-media escapee (he was once art director at
the Tucson Weekly), years ago turned his attention to making 3-D
art out of scraps. His lively “Dancer” is a cheerful figure with
twisted wire for limbs, painted artist’s drop cloths for clothes, and
real-life jewelry for adornment. Her red crystal eyes glitter as she
gleefully raises aloft a painted cloth.

Ira Weisenfield is careful to provide a key to his outlandish “Baby
Boomer Rocker,” a giant chair made out of forged steel and found
objects. A Coke bottle, he writes, stands in for that old-time drug
use. A sledgehammer and sickle represent lefty politics, and the fins
on the chair’s swooshing rocking runners are a reminder of ’50s
cars.

Rug-hooker Janet Soares has gone a little nuts with thrift-store
woolens. She dyes the old clothes new colors—weird shades of
maroon, gold and blue—and then cuts them into strips and
hand-hooks them into new-old fabrics. But she doesn’t stop at rugs.
Here, she’s upholstered a slipper chair with a crazy pattern called
“curls and flames,” and a cube with a design called “diagonal flames
with curls.” These pieces look like chairs the devil might use, if the
devil were a crazy cat lady who dressed exclusively in thrift-shop
finds.

Don Baker uses a technique I’ve never seen before, in works that are
both serious and alluring. He takes pieces of tossed-out metal and
arranges them in patterns on a stretch of white-gessoed canvas. Then he
wets everything down and waits for the metal to rust into the cloth.
The gorgeous rust color transfers as easily as the inks in a standard
print.

In “Remington Rand,” he’s taken the parts of the disassembled
typewriter, including the slender metal bars that once attached the
letters to the machine, and reorganized them into a starburst. The
white cloth, imprinted with their outlines, is like a shroud of Turin,
a death cloth for the industrial age.

David Adix makes figures out of castoffs, but his humans have a more
serious mien than Davenport’s. And he sticks with a single material in
each one: plastic supermarket bags for “Seated Figure” and “Kneeling
Figure,” and computer cords and cables for “Wireless.” Neither male nor
female, his figures are long, attenuated Homo sapiens, with the tiny
head and long limbs of a Mannerist Madonna.

If Davenport’s “Dancer” lifts her arms in joy, the somber
“Wireless,” all in black, raises its limbs like a crucified Christ. In
place of a sacred heart in its chest, it has a black computer mouse. On
it are written the words “Just Wireless,” a mantra for the modern
age.

Some of the pieces in the show are pure poetry. Julie Sasse’s little
assemblages, of wings and shells and screens, touch on memory. Margaret
Suchland’s intricate collages are made out of old postcards; the faded
pictures of, say, a saguaro, and the spidery handwritten messages
conjure up lost time. Selina Littler and Imo Baird, residents of Rancho
Linda Vista, go out into the desert to pick up twigs, bark and spines,
then combine these natural materials with old metal tools to make
ethereal angels.

Gavin Troy’s works get their start on a journey, too, but his trips
are urban rather than rural. He bikes around Tucson and picks up scraps
of wood, nails, string, whatever small objects catch his eye. Back in
the studio, he leaves some of the wood unpainted and splintery, and
paints the rest in luminous colors. Then he assembles the pieces into
small, unified works, elusive framed boxes that are half-painting,
half-sculpture.

For “Connection,” he’s nailed a kite string to a pieced-together
frame. In one corner of the shallow box, he’s carefully piled up tiny
wooden pyramids and cubes, painted pink and cream. He’s put a tiny
painted angel inside a tiny painted frame. Finally, he’s painted much
of the box a celestial blue, the color of the sky, a reminder of the
open air where he found all these art parts.

This article appears in Aug 13-19, 2009.