Writing on Mirrors

Vincent Gray

Dale Jackson's calligraphy on a mirror reflecting Ricky Walker's drawings and Patricia Murphy's sculpture.

Patricia Murphy

Patricia Murphy

Vincent Gray

Vincent Gray

Signage

Dale Jackson

Ricky Walker

Ricky Walker and Patricia Murphy

Ricky Walker

 

I had this idea to ask Dale Jackson to write on mirrors about a year ago, for a show still unnamed.  Dale's work is about writing down segments of language on any surface he can find (usually paper, but sometimes shoes, other objects, wood, etc.), words and phrases that don't interrelate as much as disintegrate, flowing and disappearing into the ether the way living life does.  It's as if he's writing verses for his own unique invisible Bible, imposing a very structured sense on nonsense, and providing a way to reiterate and reinterpet one of my favorite actual Bible verses, Ephesians 1:2:  "'Meaningless! Meaningless!' says the Teacher. 'Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.'" 

 

So Dale obliged.  On six mirror tiles, he wrote what he writes and it's somehow both magical and jarring when you see it in the gallery.  His words imposed over a reflection of a reality that has no end, no focal point, just silvery and obligatory scenery.  Black Sharpee sharpness across all that is there, sort of cinematic, sort of like midair doodling, sort of like a conversation freezing into calligraphy across the space caused by dialogue. 

 

Those mirrors vacuum in the space.  Saturday, while Bill hung Ricky's repetitive, gorgeous-Crayola drawings, I watched them appear one by one in the marked-up mirrors on the wall, and it all somehow made total sense.  Then across the gallery is Vincent's Pointillist masterpieces of boxers boxing, a whole neighborhood of disenfranchised people holding their hands up, the flashy eyelids of Diana Ross.  And in the middle of the floor, Patricia's oddly shaped little figments, geometrical clouds turning into Kafka bricks, 1970s album covers for Electric Light Orchestra, resplendent with half-dead houseplants and a beautifully restricted sense of whimsy. 

 

This show called "Makeshift" keeps flashing in my head like a book of poems I read when I was in high school and only now can understand.  It's a bunch of blocked-out, accidental haikus and villanelles, a suite of works you can't solve a puzzle with, and yet when you see all of their works stationed in one room it seems somehow predetermined, makeshift in a totally wonderful way.

 

I know, I know.  I keep going on and on.  But I think it's taken me about 15 years to understand this is what I want art shows to look like.

 

February 28, 2015 "Makeshift:  New Works by Vincent Gray, Dale Jackson, Patricia Murphy, and Ricky Walker" opens with a reception 6 to 10 pm.

  



Perfect Little Nothings

Patricia Murphy

Ricky Walker

Vincent Gray

Dale Jackson



 

Some of the shows we do at Thunder-Sky, Inc. are junked-up paradises, maximalist, thrift-store exercises in gorgeousness that seem to fall apart as soon as they come together, and come together as soon as they fall apart.  "She Blinded Me with Science," one we did in 2013, comes to mind:  lots of pseudo-steamer-punk flourishes, a silly overarching narrative attached to a 1983 techno pop-song, etc.  Just dumb fun.  "Dumb fun" in the best sense though.  We've done shows dedicated to freak flags, to Raymond's messy sense of place and non-place, to art-school drop-outs.  The gallery has been home to vast expanses of sewn-together plastic grocery-store bags, Magic-Marker-ed rocks, Antonio Adams' complicated all-consuming cosmology of super-stardom and non-super-stardom.  We've had a basement full of monster drawings from a nine-year-old boy's notebooks, as well as walls covered in heavenly, William-Blake-inspired kid drawings, and don't forget:  one whole gig dedicated to a homeless guy's hats. 

But this one we're doing the end of this month (opening February 28, 2015, with a reception 6 to 10 pm) is one of my faves because it has a focus and a predetermined feel to it, comprised of works that are humble, conceptual, silly and pretty.  I kind of pulled it together in my head before I even found the name for it:  " Makeshift," one of those nondescript adjectives that feel derogatory coming out of your mouth and yet somehow regal going into your brain.  I first thought of a show like this one when I saw the works of Ricky Walker, someone Bill met through his work as a social-worker, kind of like back in the old pre-Visionaries-+-Voices days, an artist who only has access to crayons and copy-paper, and thus creates what he creates with what's at hand:  simple, nervous, perfect little nothings that somehow have a grandeur and power, like New Wave album covers or notes written in secret in a language not yet invented.  That led me to think about Dale Jackson, an artist who uses both V+V and Thunder-Sky, Inc. as places to make stuff, and by "stuff" I mean long poetic treatises on paper, cardboard, and wood, in marker usually, made from non-sequiturs and overheard and/or remembered phrases, catch-phrases, and old Motown classic.  Dale creates an endless expanse of language without giving a crap about what it means, only feels, kind of like the James Joyce of Kroger parking lots (that's Dale's day-job, working at Kroger).  Ricky's wordless missives match right up with Dale's wordy ones, until they make a trade-off, translating into one another.  Vincent Gray is an artist who has come to many Thunder-Sky, Inc. shows, sometimes bringing his work with him and showing it to folks on the sidewalk during openings.  I included him in this one because he is pure style, and the paintings I chose to be in "Makeshift" are exercises in Pointilism, that old-school 19th Century technique.  Dots blur into imagery, like visual measles, developing lush, sad pictographs like the one above, almost anonymous, but also kind of feverish too.  Patricia Murphy's sculptures have a carefree concentration to them, colorful, blissful, a little off, and I thought of her work once I saw the three other artists' works together.  I needed something off the wall, literally.  Made of all kinds of low-end and high-end materials, Patricia's works have a cartoonish melancholy that seems both dreamy and yup makeshift, like boats adrift a sea of plastic kindness. 

So this one is personal to me somehow, and a little more careful, but still has a comfortable, late-afternoon feel to it, like watching TV after school, or doodling and/or writing love-letters in church, or listening to the radio right before you go to sleep on a summer day:  pictures, words and other things that kind of melt away your decision not to see them.

"Makeshift:  New Works by Vincent Gray, Dale Jackson, Patricia Murphy, and Ricky Walker," opens last Saturday in February, 2015.  Reception 6 to 10 pm.

Candy Store

Bill did a great job installing "Words and Pictures by Eric Deller, Dale Jackson and Michael Weber" at semantics gallery in Brighton on Wednesday.  The concept for the show came from talking about how Dale and Michael make pictures from the opposite ends of the spectrum of picture-making.  Then Eric came into the gallery one day with his pictures culled from storybook tropes.  We got to talking:  Dale uses words, Michael uses no words, just paint and patience, and Eric merges words and pictures into iconography.  All three make visual art that kind of delves into a place where memory coalesces into dream, Dale's words and phrases dissolving into moments that don't make sense at least unilaterally, Mike's colors and shapes blending into gorgeous gobs of nothing, and Eric riffing on what you see right after the story ends and you're about to go to sleep. 

Then we came across what Krista Gregory (who oversees exhibitions at Visionaries and Voices) did with Dale's work back in March at the Contemporary Arts Center:  she stacks Dale's non-sequitur posters into volumes of information that reveal and conceal simultaneously as you unveil them, or as Krista writes about the project, "A rectangular volume of layered colored paper, like candy, exposing only the top layer of writing." 

The candy thing stuck in my head, until I finally had a tiny epiphany.  It goes something like this:

Dale Jackson

 

Michael Weber

 



 

 

 

Eric Deller

 

Necco, the original candy wafer, is a direct touchstone for me for what Krista and Dale did in the stacked poster piece.  Wafers melt on your tongue in a religious sort of way of course, and Neccos are concealed in beautiful see-though wax-paper.  And my dad used to bring them home sometimes from work because they had them in the vending machine at the Indiana Gas Company.  I remember loving them very much until I tasted them, and all you could taste was a sort of slate-like nothingness concealed in sugary dust.  Dale's writings conceal a lot of desire and thought and feeling, using mundane nomenclature and non-sequitur to get at a brilliance beyond thought.  He wants to write a diary that exposes every single second of his life.  When his musings are written on colorful poster-board and stacked the whole thing becomes a repository of thought, innocent and clever at the same time, and all of Dale's poetry ascends to a place you can't name:  it's a metaphysical candy-store.  Everyone welcome.

And when I wrote about Michael's work for the show, I wrote about "jelly beans melting into a sky."  Which is pretty close to what Michael seems to want to happen.  He wants something solid to blend into something spiritual.  He's tasting things with paint somehow, like all really good abstract-expressionists seem to want to do, but he doesn't let style get in the way.  His pictures transcend that neat little need to be "good," and go off somewhere to have fun.  You could stare at the incidental images for days, and find an assortment of messy, wonderful associations.  Like staring into a bowl of jell beans or finding shapes and meaning in clouds.

The background in Eric's pictures of storybook tropes resonate in that same way:  smeared color swirling into nostalgia, with stark shadows of the memory superimposed.  It's like stained-glass made out of tissue-paper, delicate and translucent, but then a sort of Germanic side-swipe, an iron-clad illustration of a whispered bedtime story, little words that form big images.  A wolf dressed like a grandma and a little girl with an ax making sure all is well, and so on...

Let's end this with Proust, the master of aestheticizing memory:  "We are able to find everything in our memory, which is like a dispensary or chemical laboratory in which chance steers our hand sometimes to a soothing drug and sometimes to a dangerous poison."

Love Letters

 

 

Krista Gregory, the Visionaries + Voices Exhibitions Director, writes about Dale Jackson's work:

 

Accumulation of ideas and thoughts and paper:  Dale Jackson's commentary falls across the page with a non-sequitur/poetic beauty as an accumulating collection of ideas and thoughts reflective of his everyday: TV, the bus ride, automobiles he sees, songs which move him and people who've touched him: exercises in kindness and rudeness.  Documented on page after page of poster board in an expressive script akin to Cy Twombly, collected (here for a year), and stored for the eyes of no one.  semantics will present one year of Dale's writings, in collaboration with V+V Exhibitions Director Krista Gregory, in a large stack. Formally, it presents a sculpture in the vein of Felix Gonzales-Torres: A rectangular volume of layered colored paper, like candy, exposing only the top layer of writing.  The exposed top piece will be for sale, if it is sold, the next layer will be exposed and for sale, and so on and so on and so on...to slowly reveal Dale's tranquil daily reflections as one would mindfully reflect back thru a stack of love letters, painstakingly one at a time.

We're pulling together an exhibit at Semantics Gallery in Brighton that opens on Saturday called "Words and Pictures:  New Works by Eric Deller, Dale Jackson, and Mike Weber."  Reception 7 to 11 pm:  more info semantics gallery.  Please stop by if you can.  And thanks to Krista for her lovely love letter to Dale's art.

I Was Dreaming When I Wrote This

(We're publishing a book of poems/prose inspired by Dale Jackson's text-works (titled I Was Dreaming When I Wrote This), to debut at the opening of "2 + 2 = 5:  Collaborations" 4/29/2011.  This is my contribution -- a villanelle (sort of) made up of lines from Dale's pieces... [Keith Banner])

Nobody’s Nothing


How long does it take to find out?
Batman needs a new partner.
Nobody’s nothing.

It fits just right.
The driver starts turning the wheel.
How long does it take to find out?

Remember it comes back in the night.
(I say forget it.)
Nobody’s nothing.

This is American Idol
Flying out of the Batcave.
How long does it take to find out?

They out of luck.
Look at the price.
Nobody’s nothing.

Black SUV come flying down the road
90 miles per hour.
How long does it take to find out?
Nobody’s nothing.

The Art of the Finger on a Cold Window

Tracy Featherstone + Krista Connerly

Judith Brotman 

Dale Jackson

 

Last night I went to the U-Turn Art Space's opening reception for "The Mechanics of Joy," a show featuring the works of five artists:  Tracy Featherstone + Krista Connerly, Judith Brotman, Dale Jackson, and William Howe.  The show is a dreamy collapse of mechanics into poetics or maybe the other way around, and the whole experience of seeing it is like witnessing someone trying to write a villanelle on the inside of his/her skull, and instead of using actual villanelle language he/she uses whatever is around his/her subconsciousness:  fragments of cardboard and plastic, transmission fluid stains, sleeping bags, lost shapes and sympathies from childhood, vague but intense moments written down on wrinkled pieces of newsprint.  Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera...

Each work teaches you how to worship what you think has been sent to the figurative and literal landfill.  In this phantom zone provided by U-Turn you learn how to reconfigure what "ephemeral" and "fever" mean when laced together.  Claes Oldenburg kind of gets at this in his Pop-Art manifesto from 1961, "I Am for an Art."  In the piece he goes through a litany of meanings of the kind of art he "is for," including "an art that imitates the human, that is comic, if necessary, or violent, or whatever is necessary," and "an art that is smoked like cigarettes," and "an art that a kid licks, after peeling away the wrapper."  Oldenburg is on a verbal safari for art that leaves itself behind and finds its truths and pleasures beyond what art is supposed to be, even though it still is in a gallery looking and acting like art.   

All of this art-hating-itself-but-really-loving-itself, however, gets at something serious and maybe even a little divine in "The Mechanics of Joy."  The precision of placement, the way objects and language both mock and harmonize with one another give the show a sharp simplicity that foregrounds the mystery of engineering without the safety net of practicality:  Judith Brotman's intricate and angelic sculptural fragments and figments hold court beside Dale Jackson's non sequiturs about (among many other issues) "what could cause Speed Racer to go off the road."  The beautifully utilitarian puppet-show featured in Tracy Featherstone and Krista Connerly's collaboration leans up against a telephone-pole beside the ghostly print pollutions by William Howe. 

This exhibit is a machine that travels unique distances without ever leaving the lot.  There's a celebration of absurdity without any explanation or political rant:  just what it is, here, in the gallery, a moment of mechanical thought idling into a weirdly innocent vision of joy.  

One more Oldenburg's "I Am for an Art" quote, and I'm out of here: 

"I am for the art of things lost or thrown away....  I am for the art of crayons and weak grey pencil-lead...and the art of windshield wipers and the art of the finger on a cold window, on dusty steel or in the bubbles on the sides of a bathtub."

I WAS DREAMING WHEN I WROTE THIS

"Remember Me as a Good Thing: Words & Images by Kendra Bayer-Foreman & Dale Jackson" opens April 30, 2010, with a reception 6 to 10 pm at Thunder-Sky, Inc. The exhibit closes June 16, 2010. It's another piece of evidence to prove that art is art and artists are artists and 2 + 2 = 5. Dale is someone we met through Visionaries & Voices (he still goes there one day a week, I think). Kendra we met back in the day (1999) through a one-person show she did at an art center in Hamilton, OH. Dale and Kendra have collaborated on a couple pieces, but mainly their works play off each other so well that is seems kind of redundant. The show itself is a cool collaboration. Dale makes art out of overheard words and phrases, painstakingly recreating conversations, TV talk and memory-speak in careful stenography on wood panels. Kendra paints delicately surrealistic paintings, the visual equilivant of Dale's accidental poems; her pictures are dream-conversations somehow recorded without words. "Remember Me as a Good Thing" showcases both their bodies of work as beautifully serendipitous, and sweetly mysterious, pieces of an ongoing puzzle, every wall in the exhibit a jigsaw of information you don't actually understand until you stop trying to. Top: "Black SUV," Dale Jackson, acrylic paint maker on wood panel, 2010. Bottom: "Memory," Kendra Bayer-Foreman, acrylic on canvas, 2009. Photo of Dale Jackson's work by Bob Scheadler, Daylight Studios.