Two years ago, I reviewed the inaugural River City Biennale in Wichita as “The DIY Biennale.” Co-founders Ann Resnick and Elizabeth Stevenson, along with curator Stacey Switzer, organized an amazing set of installations on a shoe-string budget. The second, recently completed, incarnation of the River City Biennale, seems to have moved from a complete do-it-yourself format to one with a greater air of legitimacy. RCB now has a board of directors and a wider network of sponsors, and the Wichita Arts Council partnered with them to provide small stipends to each of the chosen artists.

One of the goals of RCB is for Wichita residents to engage with critical contemporary art produced within their own communities. The artists exhibited are chosen from a pool of applicants by a curator from outside the community. This year’s curator, Hesse McGraw, a former senior editor at Review and previously the assistant director of the Max Protetch Gallery in New York, traveled from the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha. Through the selection process, McGraw narrowed the pool to a group of eight artists with Wichita connections—Kristin Beal-DeGrandmont, Joey Capadona, Marc Durfee, Sarah Kephard, Monika Meler, Lisa Rundstrom, Larry Schwarm, and Derrick Stanley—and grouped their work across three different venues, the African American Museum, Project Gallery, and Fisch Haus Galleries.

McGraw developed the theme of “Inland Systems” to help bring coherence to his selections. As the title vaguely suggests, many of the works make reference to some form of landscape, whether it’s the urban landscape of Wichita or a more personal “landscape” or set of experiences. This theme was particularly evident in several strong works at Project and Fisch Haus. Lisa Rundstrom’s layered installation of paint on plastic and paper with light exhibits literal landscape imagery, as do Larry Schwarm’s photographs of fires on the Kansas prairie. Monika Meler’s mixed media book, draped across a table and floor, evokes the endless Midwestern rural landscape in its long horizontal format, while its abstracted geometric imagery touches on a more urban feeling. Kristin Beal-DeGrandmont’s installation at Project similarly evokes an in-between feeling, an overlap of urban and rural experiences. Joey Capadona embraces the urban landscape in “City of Wichita Check Map,” a video projection in which he maps out all of the check-cashing businesses in the city. Further underlining the blight of predatory lending practices, Capadona weekly performed as Mr. Moneybags, a character on stilts who distributed out hand-printed money to passersby. Sarah Kephart’s Chandelier, while strikingly reminiscent of the wax sculptures of Petah Coyne, makes abstract reference to urban life in a monochromatic found-object Louise-Nevelson sort of way.

One of the strengths of the 2010 RCB lies in its diversity of media. Wichita artists, like those around the world, increasingly seek to take their work off the wall and interact with the viewer in an artistic experience, such as in video and performance works. Resnick and Stevenson organized some admirable community events to help viewers more fully understand and engage with contemporary art in general. Another potential great strength of RCB is its embrace of multiple venues. This year’s inclusion of the African American Museum should have been an opportunity for artists to interact with history and with the space itself. Unfortunately, the works there seem grouped there by default, interacting neither with each other nor with the space. Presumably, the curator had some vision for organizing the works the way he did, but he imparted no insights to the viewers. Unlike the strong catalogue essay written by Stacey Switzer for the first RCB, this year’s incarnation included nothing from the curator. As in any exhibition, some works speak more loudly to the audience than others. An essay, or even a simple wall text, from the curator would have helped those quieter works find additional engagement from their viewers.

            To be honest, I am a person who is weary.  For all sorts of reasons.

            I am tired, (exhausted really) of this continual effort of living, of hoping someone will say “I love you,” or “Hey – you are beautiful!” or simply “Hello: you matter.”

            What are we?  We pretend and pretend and pretend.  We shapeshift personalities and beings as often as we eat or sleep, listen to music or breathe.

            We’re amazing and psychotic (clinically speaking).

            And we’ll use everything, anything, quite basely, to simply shout “I am!”

            And we use “Art.”

            We use “selves.”  We use “others.”  We use objects and actions and language.

            To say:  I AM.

            We use our bodies, our children, talents, wood, paint, plastic, light and luggage,

Furniture, robots, clothes, paper, jewelry, yards and homes to tell you:

SEE ME?  I. AM. HERE.

            What strikes me as particularly valuable and rich about this RCB show is that it is filled with complex and versatile, committed and exceptional artists who deconstruct and rebuild, inquire and assess, soar out and burrow in, to this essential conundrum of being.

            From the landscapes we’re imbedded in that form/inform us (Kristen, Larry, Lisa, Monika) to the trappings, objects and habits that accompany us (Marc, Sarah, Derrick, Joey).  The persons that surround and source, violate and encourage us (Sarah, Monika) the apparatus and technologies of ourselves and our world that we invent and that still fabricate us (Lisa, Joey, Derrick, Marc).  Our own bodies and minds (all) the society and culture we swim in (all).

(I’m listening to “Fake Plastic Trees” by Thom Yorke & company – any and all versions)

            So you happen to come and look.  Some of you will participate, listen, touch, act, feel.  Some of you will feel.  Some of you will stop.  (If only for a moment).

            What is grand about this community of artists is that they utilize home, people (persons), objects, landscapes, technologies, matter and body and mind, emotion, dream and thought not simply to express “Here I Am.”

                                                                        But “Here We Are.”

                                                …and not as an answer,

                                                                                      but as a question…



Nathan Filbert 04/29/10

• on the convenience and frustration of objects –
• on the nostalgia and wonder of objects –
• on the history and dual nature of objects –

Homo Faber. The making being. Who constructs, creates, assembles, installs, operates, utilizes, labors.

Homo Ludens. The playing being. Who delights, tinkers, discovers, uncovers, imagines, enjoys.

Homo Sapien. The knowing being. Who is wise, who thinks, comprehends, investigates, questions, determines.

Does it save time? Does it make the task simpler? What is required to operate it? What function does it serve? How much space does it require? Is it appealing to the eye? How well does it marry function and form? Are we “better off” possessing it? Is it a trash product or a fixable one? What is the level of craft in commercially produced objects?

Humans make objects. By the uncountable bazillions.

Marc is fascinated and alarmed by them. Particularly “found objects,” objects that have acquired a history. What rooms has this vacuum vacuum’d? Whose hands have changed the bag? Gripped the handle? Attached the hose? What items and toys have disappeared into it?

A radio. Whose heart has it soothed? What news has passed through its wires? Whose love has it increased, expressed, or ruined? What grief has it accentuated or comforted? What would have transpired otherwise…without it?

Is it beautiful? This pipe. The building it has conveyed essential water to and from? The people depending on it. The assemblers wage…

The human mind is capable of complexity, imagination and understanding. What dialogues do these apparently disparate objects hold? Where do they bond? How? Why have we made them? What do they carry of us? What do we retain of them? A photograph, kitchen appliance, toy, tool…objects associated with relationships, achievements, loss… What is an object outside of its designed use, or combined with another object, or with a handle on it?

When does an object become over-convenient…frustrating? When do we begin to serve or obey the objects we have made (or the national or corporate entity producing, programming, promoting and providing said object)? Useful objects require participation, accessibility, action/interaction. The things we carry. Our “luggage,” our views of ourselves, what we think we need.

Humans make. Humans explore and combine. Humans (can) think. What do you make, create? What do you use or obey? What do you think of that?

Objects as mirrors. Objects explored. Objects enjoyed. Objects utilized.

Make. Use. Play. Question. Discern.

Interact.

Nathan Filbert 04/24/10

DERRICK STANLEY – ROBOT MIND

The tension between form and content is an old one. The parameters of finitude have tormented creative humans since the inception of making and being. Whether the tool is one’s hands, one’s thoughts, one’s language, one’s knowledge, bodied motion or breath; and the technic a brush, a concept or theory, a word or sentence, an explanation or hypothesis, a stage or an instrument; whether the medium be paint, clay or plastic; science, mathematics or philosophy; poetry or prose; conjecture or research; dance, rhythm or music, the wrestling goes on…inspiration, idea and experiment – struggling through the body, through the tools, through the mediums toward – beauty? form? balance? energy, power? expression? communication?

Art lives from constraints, and dies from freedom.
(Leonardo da Vinci)

“Mechanisms” he calls them. “Everything is new and in progress…” he says.
The wildness and weirdness of creative processes.
What might a “mechanism” of creative process be?
What if you had a robot in your head, constantly whirring and clicking and moving about, marking and tracing and tracking your thoughts? Possibilities? How busy would it be?

Derrick’s head might be a robot set in motion.
Might be unstoppable action.
Might be new and in progress NOW.

If Derrick’s head spawned.
If Derrick’s head spawned, it would give rise to a robot, busily buzzing around sheets of paper, sketching, drawing, marking with ink pen.
Working, working, creating…
A maker’s mind.

So here is Derrick’s mind as a robot, astir with actionable influence.

Robot busies itself with sheets of paper for hours and hours while Derrick’s mind moves on. Into hand and charcoal. Into motion and composition. Into conception and experiment. Into art.
One day (each day) Derrick Stanley had (has) an idea. One day Derrick Stanley made a robot to “try it out,” which became “trying it out” which became “trying it out.” So we are interested in what Derrick’s robots are doing…and the mind minding the robots. A “godlike” creational brain, constructing a mechanism both free and constrained, given to programming and chance, working alongside.

So here is Derrick Stanley’s mind.
Here is Derrick Stanley’s mind in robot-form.
Here is Derrick Stanley’s mind observing its robot-form / action.
Derrick Stanley’s robot-mind.

For more information about the artist, please go to derrickstanley.com.

Nathan Filbert – March 19, 2010

“Painting as Relief”            

You put the album “Memoryhouse” or “Songs from Before” by Max Richter on your stereo.  Lie back in your favorite armchair like a bed.  Perhaps it is night, quiet, perhaps there is rain.  Close your eyes.

Suddenly you are seven, nine, or twelve years old again.  Headphones strung from your yellow water-resistant Walkman to the sides of your head.  You’re in the rear of the car, perhaps even facing the sky from a bucket seat in the tail of a giant station wagon, an LTD.  There are stars.  Duffel bags, hard suitcases, fishing rods and shoes surround you.  Maybe you remembered a pillow.

The vehicle also carries others, persons who will come to mean nearly everything for who you become.  Who will wound and anger you, who may save you from disaster a time or two and cause some as well.  Who may come to define you through misunderstandings, perhaps through love.

The hum and shimmy of the car on asphalt vibrates you toward a state not unlike Zen meditation, not unlike daydreaming.  From the corners of your eyes telephone poles, brush grass, rock cutaways, buildings, cows, other cars and their lights, an occasional tree, perhaps a horse become indistinguishable strokes of a hazy bluish gray’d light, darkness, running shadow.  It’s stop motion.  Primordial moving pictures.  The open language of Kansas like a canvas.

An oil derrick, rocking up and down, becomes a still life in the landscape rushing past.  An owl overhead, a fencepost after fencepost after fencepost.  Sometimes you cry in drowsy silence, an elsewhere-longing.  Your head lolls to the side in ways that allow saliva eventually, in slumbers, to dribble its way from your mouth, and your neck to wake in a sort of locked anguish.

There are loopholes, risks, and freedoms in traveling an open landscape.  You inhabit a barn you see, hardly protected during a bloody difficult war, huddled in piles of hay.  You take flight off of a flint hill cliff, circle slowly over this rambling car filled by a sister or brother, perhaps a mother, a father.

You begin to be the people that live out there – isolate across the expanse, a Christmas light nestled among a farmstead of trees, far out in the vast prairie.  The horse under you almost leaves the ground as you, breathless, flee the attacking tribe amongst whoops and shrieks.

Rolling, tumbling, for hours, miles.

What is painting but relief?  Structure and shadow, color and shape, layers and accumulation.  Blends of striations of strokes traveling at 75 mph.  The moon somewhere, poles hidden under sunset and nightfall.  Every memory, every dream, every love and inquiry and thought…turned inside out, upside down, over and over…

The world working its way through the world inside of you and back out again…

Magic…surprise…

For a preview of one of the artist’s biennale pieces, please see  http://kristinbeal.com/id9.html.

For more information about the artist, please see her websites, at www.kristinbeal.com and www.hackartlab.org.

Nathan Filbert  3.31.2010

“Growth Systems”

Imagine a wash made from masonite.

Diamonds shattered into glitter.

The petals of flowers melted down as glue, as brightness, as window.

Imagine the system of the world as plastic tubing

            lit by our tears and our dreams

If you could be an organism.

This is our “collective actuality”:  temporal, ephemeral, vision.

The world is scattered all about us, within us, around us…

Our mind a melting-pot and invention.

If we absorbed it (all) twisted, bent, collaged it

If we were to soak it (all) up…grab whatever came to hand or eye

If we put colored water in a plastocene bag and it was the ocean

Of our heart.  Of our capacity to smell.

Imagine straws as trees, now a forest

We were given scraps and shards…we made mountains

We gathered shit and detritus…we made jewels

What compacts in us

What infuses

What is loved.  Hated.  Feared or forgotten.

Our children as tinsel of joy

Our romance as a cloudy mylar

Our thinking as plastic leaves

We assemble.  We play.  We grieve.  We transform.

Organic.

What do you make of that?

Complex growth system.  Metaphor.  Reality.  It’s all in your head.

Veined in your limbs.  Ocular.  Liminal.  Kinetic.  Ever-growing.

NOW.

To find out more about the artist, please go to her website, at  http://lisarundstrom.com/.

Nathan Filbert  3.31.2010

MONIKA MELER – PUSTKI

Monika Meler is from Poland. 

Monika Meler is a printmaker.

She is a woman.  An artist.  A wife.

A daughter.  A teacher.  A friend.

Pustki, in Polish, means something like a mixture of “void,” “absence,” and “lack” in English.

After her father died, Monika called to inquire after her mother’s well-being.  “It’s pustki everywhere,” she said.

Edmond Jabes has written that “Lack is the origin of the book.”

Like holes in memory.  Like puncture wounds, the scars.  Like ancient ruins, meaning-making, thought.  Like layered printmaking.  Like palimpsest.  Like love, grief.

What is gone or lost, effaced, erased, scratched-out or deceased never disappears but forms an absence, a layer of presence that bleeds into everything after.

The underside.  Foundations.  A blemish.  Once a slate, no “clean” slate occurs. 

Things are dropped along the way.  We recall…vague smells, faces flitting, a voice, a whistled tune.  The creaking of a swing in a park.  The ways pain affects our entries into futures.  The way bone heals.

Layers.  Layers.  Gaps.

Read Monika’s book like you would the rings of a tree.  A geological cross-section, an archaeological dig.  There are strata upon strata of shapes and impressions, printline over printline over stain, cut, affix.  Time. 

When something important is excised, we fill it.  The substitution never matches, not exactly.  The seams show.  The shadow is complicated.  We do not feel singularly.  Purity vanishes at our first exhalation.

I lost my heart, what is it I love with now?  That “same” heart? (albeit torn, ratcheted, scarred…layered, strengthened, filled..?)

Shape.  Ruined, rewritten, erased, written again, covered over.  Extracted.  Retold.

One never enters the same stream twice.

Turn it over.  Examine what’s underneath.  Hold it up to the light: what began it?  What is hidden in what is hidden in what is hidden?  Every seven years a new skin, not all at once, indecipherable.

“Lack is the vertigo of the book.”

“It’s pustki everywhere.”

To see more of Monika’s work, go to http://monikameler.com/.

Nathan Filbert – March 18, 2010

If I need it, I’ll make it.  If I can’t afford it, I’ll find it, salvage it, discover another way.  I need to be able to carry it on my back, or in a trailer, or…this van I’ve got!  It’s got to move, happen, be a process, dismantle/reassemble, flex on the way.

I’m here.  There’s this guy from Switzerland making vital paintings and carrying an electric drill loaded with permanent markers he uses to make tattoos…join me!  Impermanent permanence, now you see me…

I’m here.  I built a printing press of a bottle jack and whatever else I needed.  Set it up, lithograph, line drawing, language – watch it go!  Make!  Join!

I fashion old-style overhead projectors from cast-off computers and television sets, I create lenses for them, I project – you project!  Join me!

This is a “free country for free people” (so they say) with an infinite number of fees to be paid.  I can make a room out of this…come inside…watch yourself…see what self the culture shouts at you…think.  Join.

See that wall there?  What does it say?  What’s going on inside?  What if it said this?  Or this?  (projector ON).  What if the world, the whole world, were in 3-D and you were part of every picture, event and occurrence you see?  (Here – try these glasses!)  (projector ON).  Because you are…

Ever notice those lights?  I mean really notice?  Patterns, shape, hue, mood?  Here, let’s look at them closer, box them (build the boxes of course), and light them again…see them now?  Join me!

What can I make of this?  Why I could make a spaceship, an art gallery, a new universe, a workshop, a time-travel machine, a theater, an underground retreat.  A home.  A school.  A festivity.

Life is what we make of it…and I am unable to cease…the possibilities really might be…endless…

Find me.  I’m here.

I’m here.  Join me.

I’m here now.  Join me.

Find me.  I’m here.

(projector OFF…

masterpiece…

process…

an ephemeral graffiti.)

Find me.  Join me.

For more information about Joey’s work, and the Rose Gallery, please go to his myspace page, at http://www.myspace.com/therosegallery.



Nathan Filbert 03/11/10

Let us all be from somewhere.

Let us tell each other everything we can.

- Bob Hicok

Click here to view a short slide show of Sarah’s work

I was born a boy, small, tiny even, unknown to the world, unknown to myself. I am much bigger now, my body covered in dark hair, apparently busy and productive in the world: working, speaking, parenting, loving, hating, feeling, thinking.

How did I become this me I am still unsure of? Where did I come from? What is it to be a man? A woman? A boy? A girl? How should I behave? What makes me?

My father was not exactly absent, but he traveled a great deal and therefore was gone much of my youth. I was raised primarily by my mother and my older sister. In relationships I’ve been said to play “the woman’s role,” in friendship be “androgynous,” in behavior and motion “fluid” and “feminine.”

What did my childhood produce by learning the world through female eyes and emotions? Thoughts? Never a boy of many friends – where did I tumble and wrestle and fight without a brother?

Sarah was a girl among boys. Learning her body in the rough tangle of play. What to speak, how to say, voice of culture, voices of mother / father, the jangle of classmates and the yelps of boys, brothers.

I suspect an infant forms identity, as we always do, by what we are not. Tables and chairs and toys. Things we bump into, hide under, grasp and break or lose.

“Home” is this conglomeration, this sometimes upside-down world of objects and persons we are defined by, with, against. The smell of the space between, the sweat of boys, the kitchen, bathroom, sounds of shouts and tears, wooden floors.

This is the light we live by. Turning it this way and that, reassembling, amassing what becomes us. I am this, not this (my hand burning on the stove). I am this, not this (my body pinched and panicked in the fray of struggle). This, not this (speaking quietly or harshly to my doll, mounting the helmet on my head, wielding the sword).

Now there are streets and strangers, intimates and friends. Societies, armies, universes, ideas. I am this, not this (append an object). This, not this (don a mask).

Sarah Kephart has created great work of detail and mass. The subtle lines of our individuated personalities and the gigantic weights of our pasts. It is the light we see by, the burden we bend under or dispossess. Where we come from…who we are.

I am full of lies and truth and mute angry realities. The fragility of graphite, the gravity of oak and gluey white latex. The crush and flight of families, the subtle enormity of persons.

For more information about the artist, please see her website, at www.sarahkephart.com.



Nathan Filbert 3/5/2010

Picture an amaryllis. Large burning red bloom atop a long elegant and juicily green stem, motionlessly erect in a room, rooted in rich dark soil. Every portion of this being is alive. Its cells are ceaseless action, nutrients course through its veins, it turns toward light. It stands and holds its mighty head open, outward, its grand petals sing their hue.

Or a doll: plastic, porcelain, marred by storm and neglect. Glass eyes, missing limbs, perhaps a “wrong” eye, a misfit limb. Sand ground into the pliable surfaces. Skull injured, creased from the pressure of a falling tree, a tricycle tire. Scuffed, miseried, maltreated, dead. A lifeless object that yet breathes and breeds vital responses from us, narratives, emotions.

Wooden birds. Empty frames. Taxidermied wildlife: a calf at rest, a bobcat in play, a fox in “motion.” Still and silent objects all. Vibrant and full, almost trembling with some strange energy someone sees.

Fire.

A photograph. A hundred photographs. A thousand. Who hasn’t stared into fire (campfire, forest fire, a candle, the hearth)? One man’s eyes are trained to the meditation of fire…

…the burn of a crop after harvest. Brushfire, stubble fire, blaze.

Flame dances. Exudes enormous heat. Billows smoke the size of clouds. Pops, cracks, punctuates giant skies with sound and light. Huffs like tornado’d wind, trains rushing through the night, calamitous waves, the “roaring fire.”

For the rancher smelling of sweat, soil and manure, of green grain, this grand blaze is a “controlled burn.” Framed. Captured. And yet emergency crews are at the ready. Power is unpredictable.

Larry Schwarm bought a camera to photograph his baby. It stuck.

Schwarm is from the vast flatness of Kansas. From horizon. From an ocean of soil. Unable to recall being unable to operate a tractor, at a certain bend in a certain field infinity appeared between two poles. Furrows followed forever-lines. Color was subtle, like twenty-seven shades of grey.

Buildings took shape in his mind, angles, shapes, structure. He sculpted. He kept taking pictures. People. Decisive moments presenting a face or body referencing the possible layers within, behind it. Composure. He found mirrors in the work of the abstract expressionist color field painters like Milton Avery, Mark Rothko.

Dirt. Land. Sky. Bush. Tree.

The simple sentences laid out word by word across a plane. Statement. Landscape. Black. White.

Year after year (some 40 years now!) the clicking of the shutter, the hands in the soil. Amaryllis’ rise, a 4×5 emerges correct: the combination of perfect composition and “it looking like it felt.” Thousands of contact sheets greasemarked and developed over the course of a year resulting in five. Or four. Or none at all to match his value.

Color crept into the language of sight and began the weave, the music, the inflections…fire.

It burns, it clouds, it cools…

It strafes, it wrecks, it grows…

It blooms…

Amaryllis and blaze, in Larry’s hands…complex paragraphs of vision…Rothko in an empty frame on the wall.

For more information about the artist, please see his website, at www.larryschwarm.com.

Nathan Filbert – 2/23/2010