Benjamin Duke: A River Without Banks, by Robert Sparrow Jones

Benjamin Duke’s paintings that make up “A River Without Banks,” hosted by the Paul Collins Art Gallery in Grand Rapids, MI, are as rich and layered an experience as the concepts behind the work. Whatever meaning you ascribe to the action–personal, civic, divine, or none at all–it is certain they will leave their mark. Each work is a complicated, feral environment—a portrait of a personal and universal mash-up of transcendence.

Benjamin Duke, “Crash”, 75 x 94”, 2009

During the artist opening, Duke stood before a crowded gallery and carried forth his mellifluous, spirited talk. A rich stew of complex material was made a little more accessible, and certainly enjoyable, via rhetorical flourishes, brilliant connections to poetry, philosophical discourse, and art theory. Sometimes, when it slipped into the candid portal of his own methodology—home life, fatherhood, teaching—Duke set up the necessary scrims as a prism for us to look through. All the while, his painted figures budded behind him, teetering from his large canvases into something new and a bit wild.

Benjamin Duke: A River Without Banks, at the GRCC Collins Art Gallery in Grand Rapids, Michigan

These are not sedentary works. Each painting burgeons with energy. People, objects, and spaces lure us inside to explore ideas concerning our current state of multiplicity. Actions and shifting grounds overlap the way human experience intersects. Invisible strings that tie us to the world cross and weave. This culmination of relationships and experiences imprint themselves on the viewer. They overwhelmingly represent a society of the intimate and casual connections that inhibit and build our own world. For Duke, this is where the abstract, the expression, and the figural shift and unite to create a vortex. This brings us from a state of internal weaving to a new ground of cataclysmic budding. In each work, the illusory complex, centered by this action, suggests the eternal present.

Benjamin Duke: A River Without Banks, at the Collins Gallery in Grand Rapids, Michigan

In, “Crash” a highway leads to a city, palatable of multiple intersections and boundless altering grounds. The highway is weighted with traffic and the vigor of a city wrought with possibilities forebodes in the distant. Before that, literally exploding into a new ground, Duke’s vortex takes the the form of a just-crashed and air-bound convertible. Ecstatic and uncaring, bodies are caught suspended, ejecting as a signifier of constant change. This conceptual architecture is uncentered and frenetic as behaviors, actions, and reactions come together full-force in a new dynamic, contributing to the particular transformative gestalt. The fictive world designed from those physical things forms the vortex that grows and surges toward us and locks us in. These are inescapable experiences, however momentary, however perpetually happening. It is as if Duke were stating that in the lived-in world we are untethered, though the ensuing chaos allows for wonder and grace.

Benjamin Duke, “The Compatibilists”, 62 x 93”, 2014

Although Duke’s work is intentionally rooted in a deep philosophical discourse, it is ultimately seeded in reciprocation. Here the work becomes a truth, which makes the abstract knowledge possible. Through a construct of recognizable objects and people it makes the death-defying action accurate, as in “Crash.”  But he sometimes uses terrific humor, such as in “Enter the Dragon.” Here the vortex is imbued with a teetering stack of animal, insect, and human sinew.  In the back field, behind the stack, a light, but looming architecture repeats that shape on a different ground. Duke accomplishes his humor underscored by a lack of certainty, such as in “The Combatibilists.” Here it is through the contrast of flat apparition-like shapes verses illusory space. I think Duke wants us to not experience his illusions directly, but mediated through other entities in some shared sensual space, the way his figures in “The Combatibilists” actively suggest while drinking tea. The action of disorder is a symptom of something greater, foreboding and ungraspable in its entirety.

Benjamin Duke, “Enter the Dragon”, 48 x 98”, 2013

In the lexicon of Duke’s work, lies the idiosyncratic, drawing attention to and describing of, the role of the notion of a lived-experience, lived-objects, and the present moment. There is an apparent bodily engagement and primacy in which Duke’s living connections intermingle in the world. They intertwine and resonate with a reciprocating action. Imagining multi-sensory worlds, Duke offers different levels of detail, space, light, shadow, and color with both control and abandon of the medium which creates the illusion of a multi-sensory world, embodying the corporeal and sensory dimensions all at once.

Benjamin Duke, “I’m Not Your Superman”  98 x 98”, 2013

What keeps us tethered is Duke’s perception and skills at building his worlds. However, Duke adroitly pursues abstraction and distortion without jettisoning the sensuous surfaces of objects and space. “I’m Not Your Superman” illustrates objects, figures, and space with a sense of material expression—soft, hard, cold, gritty. In visually explaining the reality of objects with textures and wear, there entails the mark of body experience. These descriptions bring specific features of that lived-experience into greater perspicuity through the distortion. This is true especially in “The Cobatibilists” where multiple perspectives and ground shifts suggest the act of seeing, and therefore consciousness. Duke’s world’s are germinating and fill up like a tableau. There is a more fundamental realm of human experience through distortion—more attuned to the actual way in which we see the world. These elements keep us looking because they feel primal. They are true and we recognize without doubt direct qualities of the physical world.

Benjamin Duke, “Nature vs Nature”, 72 x 93″, 2014

It’s not just about the illusory worlds where Duke finds center. The magic is perhaps something beyond. A liminal and urgent paint language necessitates the viscous strata Duke incarnates into the work as a body memory. Even from five feet the viewer can experience the illusions being created, the invisible made viable. So fresh it seems; again, always at present. So apparent that we are able to imagine the artist in the act of imagining while simultaneously constructing the moment. He is caught up, intensely intertwined in the midst of making all tangible. Duke is working these surfaces but he is also breaking the surfaces. This is where I think Duke embodies the concept with which he is trying to communicate. We are watching an imagined and physical experience rather than just seeing a perceptual illusion.

Benjamin Duke: A River Without Banks, at the Collins Gallery in Grand Rapids, Michigan

Duke intertwines lives to remind us that the multisensory experience can be a terribly beautiful and disastrous experience. His constructs are reflective illusions where spaces are about the body’s existence in the world, the body’s activity in the world. It is important that these are worlds that have been lived in so that pondering them we don’t feel external to them. He organizes and gives structure to different grounds through which he is positioning us. When these grounds intersect a vortex blossoms. The amplification denotes specific, important changes that occur in the physical process of creation where, in the exaggeration, lies deep significance.

Benjamin Duke: A River Without Banks, at the Collins Gallery in Grand Rapids, Michigan

Yet Duke’s paintings tell us one more secret. Duke is at his sharpest when his poetic and allusive language of materials and perceptions appear to prefigure what will be seen. Detailing the tacit, pre-reflective relationship between experience and the built world, Duke seems to be painting experience, as he is receiving it. The descriptive evidence points to that of awareness. For Duke, painting is close to the palpable life of things and the world around him. We experience Duke looking and studying and ultimately reveling in the wonder and mystery of the now. We feel that. We feel his now.

http://www.michiganquarterlyreview.com/2015/01/benjamin-duke-a-river-without-banks/

http://www.michiganquarterlyreview.com/author/robert-sparrow-jones/

Benjamin Duke: A River Without Banks, at the Collins Gallery in Grand Rapids, Michigan

Symptomatic Constant: Julie Schenkelberg, by Robert Sparrow Jones, Michigan Quarterly Review, November, 2014

The first tinge of autumn spiked the air as the streets of downtown Grand Rapids teemed with artgoers for ArtPrize, 2014. A curious line had already formed down Ionia Street, excitedly inching toward the doors of the old Morton House which was once an opulent 1920s hotel. After bankruptcy and a stint as rent-subsidized housing, the place has been vacant and boarded up, save for this year’s excellent SiTE:LAB exhibition.

Julie Schenkelberg, “Symptomatic Constant”, Installation View 1,
SiTE:LAB at ArtPrize, 2014

When I entered the multistoried ghost of a hotel, a continuous dank breeze pushed against the inside corridor, a short and dark walk under disintegrating ceilings with ominous gaping steel-meshed holes and crumpling plaster corners. The central lobby then opened up to a spectacularly dusty and ambient light where, encompassed by the walls of curling paint, Julie Schenkelberg’s sublime installation “Symptomatic Constant” sat corpulently like a shipwreck.

Julie Schenkelberg, “Symptomatic Constant”, Detail, 2014

Julie Schenkelberg, “Symptomatic Constant”, Piano View, 2014

Within the materials lies Schenkelberg’s remarkable talent for recapturing wonder. “Symptomatic Constant” is a massive work. It starts as rubble on the marble floor with plaster dust and shards of ceramic, resembling a shore of beach glass, then steadily the work grows up into the high space of the lobby’s ceiling with fabric draped from an old cast-iron heating register. Schenkelberg builds in layers with architectural salvage culled from the site itself as well as local thrifting. Her cultural archeology is distinctive in its details and restless as the whole of her ship-like installation.

Schenkelberg is a collector. She has an eye for timelessness in the materials she selects and remains an architect of renewal. This is not a matter of optimism, or recovery in any conventional sense. Rather, her voice in this work feels like that of survival, which is manifest in her abstracted ship-run-aground form. In materials, I feel her central obsession is not to preserve the past but rather to borrow it, paint with it, use it as her expression. Her incredible wonder of the antiquation plays on the collective memory of our object’s past. She rescues the perishing for a reason. The curation of materials contains a spirit, a ghost, a memory. Whether it be a worn-out grand piano (original to the hotel) or stacks of indiscrete linens, the materials resonate above their own presence. Schenkelberg’s work here is an adventure, comprised of her poetic collections without being precious. She acts as a poet who describes with pale, faded metaphors to build a wonderfully strange atmosphere.

Julie Schenkelberg, “Symptomatic Constant”, Detail 3, 2014

Looking at her work, you can envision Schenkelberg developing a specific language of things in new and surprising ways like a painter. She has a rich vocabulary of ethereal, antiquated items, such as milk glass, stacked valises, and tattered leather-bound books. She amends them with chalky robin’s egg blue and pink pastel paint the consistency of cake icing, taken from the cues of a delicately crumbling architecture. Rendered further, you can see the artist’s expression in the repetition of drilled holes, slashing cut marks, and smashed ceramic. Her hand denotes an authority that immediately gains the viewer’s trust. Her fiction envelops us in a sublimity, where even the heavy mildew fragrance of wet plaster from the old hotel’s depths adds to the authenticity.

Julie Schenkelberg, “Symptomatic Constant”, Detail 4,
SiTE:LAB at ArtPrize, 2014

Julie Schenkelberg, “Symptomatic Constant”, Detail 6, 2014

While the mythic analogies swelled up in a hull of archaic architectural sinew, I wondered what side of the story we may bring ourselves. This fiction is a dazzle but can offer more than just a touch of fatalism. It quickly brought to mind, “The Raft of Medusa,” 1818-1819, Théodore Géricault’s iconic masterpiece of French Romanticism. Géricault’s painting depicts the aftermath of a warship wreck off the coast of Senegal in 1816. Due to a shortage of lifeboats, 147 people were left behind to fend for themselves on a makeshift raft. They drifted for 13 days before the rescue of only 10 survivors. The disaster worsened by starvation, dehydration, and cannibalism that ensued and each of the figures in the painting tells the story. Géricault assiduously researched the horrific, then contemporary, incident and was able to question survivors. He even sketched them as well. Géricault built wax models and figurines and had the original carpenter of the Medusa build a scale model of the raft. He studied cadavers and body parts, visited hospitals and beaches—there is no mistaking his obsession for detail in his many sketches. It’s famously captured in the final larger-than-life painting as two intersecting pyramids of figures. On the left side, death is darkly descending in the expiration of life from an improvised mast against a foreboding weather system. On the right is hope in the ascension of bodies to the waving flag at a passing ship. Horrific and fascinating. There is no real resolve. Perhaps there is just a tinge of hope in the light and passing distant ship.

Julie Schenkelberg, “Symptomatic Constant”, Detail 2, 2014

Julie Schenkelberg, “Symptomatic Constant”, Front View, 2014

Schenkelberg is less topical in her shipwreck, but her intention and process are as tenuous, just as obsessed. Julie Schenkelberg grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, surrounded by the beauty of decaying architecture, slate-gray skies, and rusted steel. Her relentless fascination is evident in her process of seeking out and curating distinct objects. Yes, these items are ubiquitous except these objects carry a history, these objects have souls. Scrap metal yards, thrift shops, estate sales, construction dumpsters, attics, and basements—her preparation is an active and continuous search. After gathering the appropriate materials she organizes by size, color, material, like a gigantic painter’s palette.

Julie Schenkelberg, “Symptomatic Constant”, Detail 5, 2014

It makes sense to prepare for something this grand. Becoming intimate with the materials, Schenkelberg understands their properties physically and unveils their spirit. When they are pulled from the palette, each component is sensitive to space, attuned to the unique surroundings at hand in the creation of a sublime work both beautiful and frightening. Gericult worked hard in the gathering, he used it in a realistic style, but ultimately he was after raw emotion. Schenkelberg’s emotion is palatable in the tactile. She creates moments of startling presence where everyday facts are magical, visual in our own memory.

Morton Hotel, Mezzanine Stairwell.

Morton Hotel, Mezzanine Stairwell.

To the front of the lobby, sweeping staircases with Art Deco railings lead to several mezzanine level spaces with balconies overlooking the ballroom like porticos from the heavens. Beneath the fading, elaborate, delicately frescoed ceilings, “Symptomatic Constant,” exquisite in its construction of reclaimed detritus, lies romantically shipwrecked on the dusty travertine marble floor. Here are two intersecting pyramids: a crumpled ground plane elegantly shifting in tone and a pyramid of architecture thrusting upward in a hull and a sail—uncertain and intensive. From this vantage, it was appropriate to watch as patrons, beneath the ruined sky of repeated arches, discover its evasive edges. “Symptomatic Constant” resonates on this scale, alluding to a work even more vast and disquieting. It reminds us that loss is profound and that the conclusion, though ethereal, is ultimately survival in the ascension.

http://www.michiganquarterlyreview.com/2014/11/julie-schenkelberg-builds-shipwrecks-of-hope-symptomatic-constant/

Julie Schenkelberg, “Symptomatic Constant”, Bird’s-Eye View, 2014

Landscape as Process: The Art of Susan Goethel Campbell, by Robert Sparrow Jones, Michigan Quarterly Review, October, 2014

Susan Goethel Campbell, an environmentalist at the core, is a multidisciplinary artist who is deeply steeped in tradition and profoundly connected to nature. Her work is a slowly evolving dance devoted to researching, collecting data, and balancing two or three projects in different forms of completion at once. She has worked with scientists and meteorologists, but her work is far from rigid. In fact, her ideas are manifested in atmospheric ways that align our thoughts, emotions, and actions with nature.

With her large floor installation, Resisting Certainty at the Grand Rapids Art Museum, Campbell takes the art of horticulture and ingeniously turns all conventions upside down. Inverted, natural sod tiles are used as the building blocks of a larger grid. This grid intersects, overlapping three larger, flat geometric planes. The planes are dark and ominous, hovering an inch from the floor and evoking a sense of groundlessness with the shifting change of environment. Together, the organic and the synthetic push our vantage to a further point. In this atmosphere, Campbell provides us with a rich, intuitive approach to discovering and meeting nature with its patterns. These relationships are not only intellectually stimulating, but also emotionally and spiritually satisfying.

Susan Goethel Campbell in her Detroit Landscape, 2014

As Campbell was growing up in the new suburb of East Grand Rapids, Michigan, the idea of “landscape as a process” left a lasting impression on her. She played freely in the open fields among sumac, milkweed, and wild pheasants. In her exploration, deep visceral observations encompassed life and death within the drama of seasons. She understood that change also included the cultural environment that was being built. The hushed bucolic spaces and the emergent landscape would inform the center of her future work.

“The infrastructure for future housing already existed in the landscape and I thought of this as one giant playfield. Two huge, raised sewers were at the bottom of a hill where I used to go sledding. They had raised cement caps with ladders that allowed you to climb down into the sewer. During the summer months, I would climb inside where it was cool and explore what I thought was a ‘natural’ underground river. Seasonal change included not only flowering plants, but newly erected wooden armatures that dotted open fields. The framing for a new house imposed a type of geometry on my field of vision where earth and sky were bracketed by angles and planes. The smell of new lumber mingled with the smell of earth. These early experiences influenced my art and process.”

Ironically, when Susan moved to Detroit as an adult in the early 1980′s, just as many open fields existed in the city as did in her childhood landscape. And much like her youthful experience, wild pheasants were seen on deserted roads and steam vaporized from lone sewer holes. While gravity and weather dissolved houses into the earth, nature overwhelmed vast plots with trees taking root in the eaves of derelict buildings. These lasting experiences in nature are apparent in the materials and methodologies Campbell uses in Resisting Certainty. Each sod tile is molded by a vacuum-formed plastic container. Campbell grows these in her Detroit studio, tending to them for several months at a time. However, against all good horticulture practice, she allows the grass to become root-bound. By using this process, the underneath is conformed into a near perfect positive, including a symbolic grid.

Up close, the sod tiles are wonderful to explore. Constricted, the roots intricately form a natural weaving in the ribs and crevices. Around the edges, individual tiles softy sweep away like the wheat fields from Campbell’s childhood. In the center of the tiles are raised flat circles. The circle is repeated in the sod tiles left upright. This orientation allows their square-constricted bottoms to become obscured after the long grass has naturally wilted outward. The idea represented here is certainly the cycles of change. It is also the attempt to include green space in urban planning, city parks, and perhaps in the center of all communities. This motif is repeated in smaller, rolled sod tiles.

The type of natural material Campbell cultivates is a grass that, against all odds, finds a home in the rooftops of dilapidated buildings. It is a weed that thrives in the poorest of soil and is able to survive the harshest of weather conditions. We find this type of grass waist-high in a neglected plot of suburbia.

Is this blatant commentary of our attempt to coexist with nature? Or is it a failing attempt to control nature without any regard for sustainability? I don’t think the work is didactic at all. Campbell is using an appropriate symbolic building block, a micro meditation of natural and artificial environment. The work on a whole arouses an emotional response stemming deeply from the environment of our youth.

Susan Goethel Campbell, “Resisting Certainty”
2014, Grand Rapids Art Museum

Resisting Certainty is informed by the constructs of our cultural landscape. Information, by way of data, charts, graphs, and mass-produced construction are distilled into vacillating grounds of synthetic and organic planes, as a large topographical map. Yet, our movement through the installation is graceful, controlled by Campbell’s aesthetic ability. She clearly considers social interaction and bodily movement. At once I felt winged and limberly circling. Discovery was offered at every turn. Detail beckoned attention, banking around and through implied paths of organic and engineered spaces.

“My relationship to landscape has to do with impermanence, change and movement. My earliest influences and emotional epiphanies came from dance rather than visual art. The performances of Merce Cunningham, Twyla Tharp, Martha Graham, and Eric Hawkins were visual distillations of the body in time. This spoke to me. The movement was minimal, repetitious and sometimes glacial. In my late 20’s I fell in love with the Butoh dance troupe Sankai Juku. Their reference to the ground plane in their dance led me to consider cycles of renewal and decay in the landscape. This encompasses the built environment.”

Campbell takes tradition and brings it into the current era. Her manipulation of landscape is an elegant form of printmaking. The plastic container is her matrix and every sod tile is a multiple, therefore a document of the container. Campbell earned a master’s degree in printmaking from Cranbrook Academy of Art. She has been awarded printmaking residencies in Belgium and Germany. She also taught studio art for 15 years at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. I think that printmaking is an appropriate adaptation here.

“Throughout my artistic career, I have been interested in process and the intersection of nature and culture. Trained as a printmaker, the idea of recording and transferring marks from one thing to another has shaped how I work and see the world to this day. A line can be formed from an insect chewing on a leaf or a backhoe bulldozing a new road through a forest. Both micro and macro views are visual marks on the landscape…My job is to bring a voice to the material.”

The other works around the perimeter of the exhibit are just as contemplative. InSeasonal Flyers: Spring, Campbell repeats her systems on a much simpler yet still complex level. Tiny individual downy seeds of dandelion are harvested in an attempt to construct a single building block the size of a brick. Presented is a work so tenuous, so delicate that one more dandelion seed would topple it over. Closing in for a micro view, careening overtop to revel at Campbell’s precarious feat, I was most thankful for the protecting vitrine.

Campbell’s work summons reflection of the changing environment around us. Her methodology establishes a mode of interaction between people and landscape that provokes reciprocity, wonder, and gratitude. Perhaps she wants us to encounter her work as we should approach nature—respectfully discovering exactly how all its parts (ourselves included) belong.

http://www.michiganquarterlyreview.com/2014/10/landscape-as-process-the-art-of-susan-goethel-campbell/