Assemblage + Collage + Construction: Art show reflects emerging trends

The stereotype tenaciously clings to fine art. In the public mind, Great Art is still frozen in an image: oil on canvas, Rembrandt light, marble nudes, brand-name artists.

But art did not die with the French impressionists, or the Cubists, or even Andy Warhol. A new exhibit, spanning the breadth of Santa Cruz County and sponsored by 14 different arts organizations, illustrates the way that vital, relevant art is pushing beyond the tired cliches.

The project is called "Assemblage + Collage + Construction," and it honors the way many artists (including a wide variety artists who live and/or work in Santa Cruz County) work today. As its title suggests, the "ACC" show reflects art as it is emerging today, not only in the themes it addresses and the imagery it calls forth, but in the material it uses and what those materials say about any given artist's values and perspective.

Take for instance the work of San Francisco artist Jerry Ross Barrish, who creates beguiling sculptures that often reference iconic images "" "American Gothic," or Marlene Dietrich "" using PVC piping, spent cigarette lighters, cheap discarded toys and scrub brushes. Essentially, he's using the refuse and detritus "" much of it plastic "" of our throw-away culture.

Dag Weiser "" the Santa Cruz artist who, along with Barrish, is being highlighted for his work in the exhibit by the Museum of Art and History in Santa Cruz "" has made his name working in cardboard, the same kind of cardboard of which the boxes and containers that collect in almost everyone's garage is made. He uses that cardboard as both a medium and a method to express his working-man's aesthetic. In Weiser's worldview, art isn't something meant to hang in museums centuries into the future, but a response to living in the world as it is now.

The idea for the countywide show "" which features the work of a battalion of artists from Santa Cruz County, the Bay Area and beyond "" came by way of Susan Hillhouse, the curator at the MAH, shortly after arriving in town in 2006.

"It came from a desire to get to know the art community here," said Hillhouse. "In the arts, when you network with other people, magic happens."

"ACC" is the most significant outreach effort in the MAH's recent history. Other organizations involved in the project include the Michaelangelo Gallery, the Louden Nelson Center, the Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery on the campus of UC Santa Cruz, the Dead Cow and the Mill galleries, the Cabrillo College Gallery, the Santa Cruz County Bank, the Felix Kulpa Gallery, Chocolate restaurant, the Santa Cruz Mountains Art Center, the Pajaro Vallery Art Center, the Santa Cruz Art League and Vinocruz. Each venue will have their own individually mounted and curated event on their own schedule.

At the center of the exhibit is the MAH, which is open free to the public throughout the show's run The show officially opens this weekend and runs through April. Both Barrish and Weiser have been given prominent spots in the show, which also features a staggeringly diverse exhibit of the work of more than 100 artists. Those artists include such locally familiar names as Jamie Abbott, Rose Sellery, Angelo Grova, Doug McClellan, Sara Friedlander, Charles Prentiss and many, many more.

"What's so interesting," said Hillhouse, "is that we have 14 different organizations participating in this, and nobody's show is going to look alike."

Part of the mission of the exhibit is to define its terms. "Assemblage" and "collage" are familiar enough terms to those in the arts, but not as much in the general public. A good way to understand the terms is to view the difference between them the same as the difference between sculpture and painting. A collage is generally a collection of items combined on a two-dimensional surface to create a new artistic statement. Assemblage is the same thing, in three dimensions, like a sculpture. The term "Construction" is meant to convey art made from unusual or alternative materials "" such as cardboard.

As a result, the "ACC" designation embraces everything from memory boxes, common in Dias de los Muertos commemorations, to collages of discarded material. A motorcycle is built from the parts of an old vacuum cleaner. A discolored newspaper comic is reproduced a hundred fold in a dizzying, wallpaper effect.

Weiser, whose neo-carnival style can be seen at the Rio Theatre in Santa Cruz and outside his Santa Cruz home every Halloween, made an enormous chandelier for the MAH exhibit, made from streamers of cardboard, and touching on many of his artistic pre-occupations. He is also presenting a coat made from broken china and is artistically playing with the words often printed on the cardboard boxes he treasures as his artistic bread and butter.

"It's by far the friendliest art form," Weiser said of both his cardboard work and of assemblage in general. "The exhibit at the MAH is just amazing. It looks like a giant piece of candy, an explosion of color and form."

"This is all about artists trying to make something beautiful out of found objects and other unusual material," said the MAH's Hillhouse. "Much of the material is mundane stuff. But you set a challenge for an artist, and they'll meet it."

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