the new weird america

Dana Art Gallery Wellesley, MA

Weirdt h e

Ame icaR

the

new

weirdamerica

The New, Weird AmericaExhibition Catalogue

Copyright 2010 The Dana Art Gallery

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used without written permission of the publisher.

All artwork the artists. Unless otherwise noted, all reproductions courtesy the artists, their galleries, or their collectors. Poems Alexandra Mattraw. Introductory essay Erica Plouffe Lazure.

t h e

WeirdAme icaR

painting drawing collage new media machines

the dana art gallery, wellesley, ma

february 8 - march 12, 2010

Neil

SeanMattBrent

BENDERFOGTKRAWCHECKMcCARTHY

Featuring work by:

Curated by Michael Frassinelli

Essay by Erica Plouffe Lazurewith poetry by Alexandra Mattraw

and Photographs by Pat Cassidy Mollach

Essays

Matt Krawcheck

Construction diagram for Single Reel Pixadigigiga-mitigator

Ink on paper (drawing folds up into a pamplet)

2009

Foreward

New. Weird. America. Depending on whom you talk to, these words dont have as much meaning as they used to. In this Digital Age, something thought of as

new holds that title for a few weeks at best, until, with lightning speed, the new, new

overtakes it. With virtually every bizarre image available on the internet, the concept of

weird has also gone through a bit of a change. What was once thought of as outlandish/

radical/outrageous/offensive, whether it be in art, fashion or music (or politics, for that

matter), can, in a matter of years or even months, become acceptable, fashionable, and

eventually pass. With a changing demographic, fluctuating values, behavior-altering

technology and a steadily mutating popular culture, America in 2010 is certainly not the

place mom and dad remember as kids. Often it appears to be less like a melting pot and

more like some kind of hybrid pressure-cooker/atom-smasher that is in the middle of

creating a new form of matter/country/experience entirely.

The inspiration for this exhibit came about from this idea of suddenly waking

up, looking around at the changing cultural landscape and saying, You know what? I

think we are living in some strange future. It was put together as homage to/rip off

of the wonderful touring art exhibit entitled The Old, Weird America, recently held

at the DeCordova Museum.1 While the artists in that exhibit found common themes

looking back at the peculiar American past, the artists in The New, Weird America find

1. The title was taken from the title of Greil Marcus book about Bob Dylan and the various inspirations and

parallels to American history and culture found in the Basement Tape recordings of 1967.

themselves looking ahead, looking behind, and looking around at this brave new world we suddenly live in.

Their inspirations are varied, their approaches to art-making different. The things they share are some serious

surrealist tendencies, a dash of obsessive-compulsive work methods and a unique vision that allows them to

create engaging work in a highly personal style. And, for the most part, the average person (Jane Q. Public,

your uncle, Joe the Plumber, take your pick) would probably look at their work and say, Thats interesting ... but

a little weird.

(As it happens, after I chose the title The New, Weird America, I soon found out that the phrase had

already been coined years earlier--specifically by David Keenan in the August 2003 issue of the British avant

guard music magazine The Wire. The article was about the Brattleboro Free Folk Music Festival in Brattleboro,

Vermont, where a new psychedelic folk (or freak folk) movement was bubbling up.2 Coincidentally, I was

introduced to the artists in this exhibit--Neil Bender, Brent Fogt, Sean McCarthy and Matt Krawcheck--when

we all met just up the road from Brattleboro in Johnson, Vermont, as artists-in-residence at the Vermont Studio

Center, in the summer of 2009. Isnt that weird?)

Id like to thank the artists for their help in creating this exhibit and also fellow VSC writers/artists-in-

residence for their contributions: Erica Plouffe Lazure (for her thoughtful essay), Alexandra Mattraw (for her

wonderful poems, which are interspersed among these catalogue pages), and Pat Cassidy Mollach (for allowing

us to include her portraits of the artists and several other photographs). Id also like to thank the Vermont

Studio Center, the Dana Hall School for continuing to support the gallery program, and finally to Mr. Al Gore

for inventing the internet. Without e-mail, web searches, on-line servers and Facebook communications this

exhibit and catalog--and the world as we know it--would not exist.

--Michael Frassinelli Curator

2. New Weird America. Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Weird_America

Collage in the New, Weird America and the (un)Making of a Mallard

By Erica Plouffe Lazure

Im thinking of a mallard.

The writer Donald Barthelme once wrote that collage is the central

principle of all art in the twentieth century. If Barthelme were alive today, hed no

doubt be surprised that his collage theory has spanned well beyond the creative

arts, as well as the twentieth century. For in these times, our lives play out in a sort

of collage. Daily we deal with paradox and juxtaposition, placing in contextin

collage, if you willthe oftentimes disparate and bizarre elements of our lives.

Im thinking of a mallard in Vermont whose wings have been clipped.

Now more than everbetween musical mash-ups and auto-tune web

videos that meld techno beats and newsreels with spoofed, digitized versions of

a politicians catch phrasecollage as an experience of life is in full-force, moving

far past the possibilities afforded by grade-school scissors, oak tag, and a few

old magazines. How else could a McDonalds hamburger franchise thrive in cow-

loving India? How else can we account for the flourishing success of reality TV

Matt Krawcheck

Detail of scroll

Mixed-media on paper

2009

Boston-based

mash-up singer

Katie Enlow

shows and self-outing online social networks in a culture obsessed with

privacy? And how is it, with our nation at war, that the President of the

United States can receive the Nobel Peace Prize? Perhaps its fitting that he

did: each of us knows the difficulty of diffusing hostile situations with the

people in our lives. Setting the tone for peace may be just what we need.

The lone mallard quacks. He swims in a river swollen from two days of rain. He quacks to no one.

It makes sense, then, that collageas an art form, as a narrative

strategy, as an experience of life in this particular moment in timeholds

relevance. We live and work in the cut-and-paste. We take fragments

of ideas, fragments of sentences, and synthesize them into a seemingly

coherent whole. Collagetaken from the French word for glue

celebrates appropriation. It takes an existing idea or object and mixes it

with imagination. It reinvents what is into what might be. Borne of this

energy, collage yields something new, something never before considered or

seen.

Crossing the bridge above the swollen river is a woman on her way to lunch. She stops to watch the mallard. She notices a note of panic in his quack. He wont stop quacking. She sometimes sees a flock of mallards on the river, but not today. She looks upstream, then downstream. Where, she wonders, is his family?

The work in the New, Weird America exhibit offers an experience

of this kind of collage: an amalgam of invention, appropriation, playfulness,

and spontaneity. For Sean McCarthy, it emerges in the pen-and-ink birth of

creatures never before imaginedpart spooky, knowing camel, part sweet

demon, part winged fish. For Brent Fogt, it surfaces in patient, topographical

Sean McCarthyUvallInk and graphite on paper: 9 x 8 inches.2007.

undertakings composed of a hundred thousand meticulously drawn

circles. For Matt Krawchek, it is a mission to paint an epic personal

narrative that ricochets from Big Bird to the boom box, from Mini Me

to a new take on PowerPoint. For Neil Bender, it is a sexploration of

eros in hot gummy pink flashes through the lens of pop culture and

cutouts of wandering pheromones.

The mallards smooth green head moves left, then right, as though it is searching for something along the shore. The woman holds an umbrella in the crook of her arm, convinced the rain will return. She also is convinced that the swollen river has swept away the other mallards and he alone is the sole survivor, now looking in vain for his loved ones.

As creators, we must experience juxtaposition in order for a

connection to be made. For within these seeming bifurcated spaces

lies the gift of connectivity. In recognizing that the links between

objects and ideas can be as important as the objects and ideas

themselves, we are able to experience the nature of relationships. We

are able to see within ourselves how juxtaposition can reside, how

that which we view as other, as not me, can become me with a

little thought and compassion. It is in the recognition of the energetic

interface of two seemingly separate entities that