Caleb Charland: From the Basement to the Backyard

Center for Maine Contemporary Art
Rockport, Me.
July 27 - Sept. 22, 2013


Potato Power
The blurb on Caleb Charland's new exhibit at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art declares that his photography "springs from a place of wonder," and that's certainly as I will show later. But first, I think we need to look at the satirical componenet of his work, the part that portrays an image that alternates between the ludicrous and the possible.

Artistotle, I think, said that tragedy shows us the human possibility for noble actions whereas comedy points out our foibles, our many foibles. A photograph at Charland's web site (I'm not sure whether this photo is the show, although similar ones are) called Potato Power is a good starting point for this interplay between the ludicrous and wonderful possibility.

The photo depicts a floor lamp in a potato field with a number of leads going from the lamp's socket to the ground. The leads are actually attached to nails stuck in potatoes that have been uncovered from the surrounding rows. Well, of course, you can get electricity from potatoes by sticking a copper nail and a zinc nail into a potato. The chemical composition of the potato sets up a flow of ions from one nail to the other. In other words, a current. An electrical current.

So, you begin to wonder. Is it possible to power our country on potatoes? But, then you realize that would take a lot of potatoes, and a lot of power expended to grow those potatoes. The net effect would be probably be a loss in power production. And yet, what if we could mechanize and automate potato growing? But, now, we're back to same type of system we live with now, and you just have to laugh at how stupid and smart we are.

And yet, the photo reveals something else. There may be an answer in nature in which energy production is not as ruinous to the environment. Obviously, a time-lapse photo, Potato Power shows in the background sky, arcs of light made by stars. Stars are powered by fusion, which releases energy (and no radiation) while fusing hydrogen into helium. There, in the natural world, is an energy answer, but, to date, our technology has not been able to harness it. Perhaps we can; or perhaps, we will find some other source beneath our feet or above our heads.


Caleb Charland
Wooden Box with Horseshoe Magnet
Courtesy Center for Maine Contemporary Art

One last word on a photo of an object in Charland's show called Wooden Box with Horseshoe Magnet (left). At first look, you think there must be a trick to the nails lined up in midair, but, of course, it's magnetism. The nails are connected to some type of string. I wonder what would happen if the nails were connected by a thin copper wire. Would the opposite poles of the magnet cancel out, making the nails fall to the ground? 




Ballpoint Pen Art Since 1950

The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum
Ridgefield, Conn.
Runs to Aug. 25


Making art with a ballpoint pen, the subject of an exhibition at The Aldrich, brought to mind my own brief career in fifth grade with the medium. Inspired by watching drag races on ABC's Wide World of Sports, I used a ballpoint pen on lined paper to draw dragsters while sitting at my desk in school. Heavily influenced by Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, my dragsters featured exaggerated engines with dual carburetors and huge manifolds, driven by a stick figure with his hands on the steering wheel and a smile on his face. I was famous among the critics, my classmates.

To put on an entire exhibition of ball point pen art, Ballpoint Pen Drawing Since 1950, does not seem unusual to me. From reading curator Richard Klein's essay, I found that I was not the only grade-school, ballpoint pen artist. Russell Crotty drew stick figure surfers riding surfboards on waves of doodle-like swirls. Later in his career, he drew ball-point drawings of astronomical phenomena, taken from observations he made as a serious amateur astronomer. If only I had stuck with my ballpoint. Who knows where I might have progressed from my dragsters?



Jan Fabre Tivoli Castle 1990-2007
Courtesy of Aldrich Museum

The exhibition shows a wide range from the pedestrian ballpoint pen, with skecthy portraits on book covers by Alberto Giacometti to moody inked-over photographs by Belgian artist Jan Fabre who completed hundreds of ballpoint drawings between 1977 and 1992, according to curator Klein. The heavy layering of ballpoint ink gives the works an intriguing chiaroscuro effect. You find yourself looking in every dark corner for something to emerge.
 
One ballpoint "method" that does not seem to be represented is a transfer technique that also uses the heavy layering of ballpoint ink. I'm not quite sure how I "discovered" this technique -- perhaps from my fingers inadvertently picking up blobs of ballpoint ink while writing and depositing the mess a few lines later when my fingers again made contact with the paper. Whatever the genesis, I began heavily inking irregular shapes on a sheet of paper and then turning the paper on to a clean sheet and rubbing the top sheet with a ruler or knife handle or spoon.

The resulting "print" was faint, since the ballpoint ink was not particularly wet. Still, the faintness and varying intensity of the color was part of the fun. So, although curator Klein writes that many thought that the ballpoint was the death of good penmanship, I discovered a small artistic phenomenon from the scratches and smears of my sloppy handwriting. And inexpensive ballpoint pens.