|
|
Writings
Wunderground
RISD Museum; for Providence Monthly, 2007
1995 was a long time ago. Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts
were still married, Toy Story was the top-grossing movie of the year,
and Capital One was a brand new company.
On the other hand, you could say that 1995 wasn't so
long ago. Everyone's still obsessed when wildly popular actresses marry
goofy-looking country singers, the top movie of last year--Harry Potter
and the Thing of Whatever--was also meant for kids. And let's please
not talk about those stupid Capital One Viking commercials.
It's the same thing locally. Eleven years ago, the
Providence art scene wasn't very well-known, hardly anybody went to see
noise bands, and no developer in their right mind wanted anything to do
with Olneyville.
Flash forward and everything's different. Since then,
Providence's Forcefield got into the Whitney Biennial, bands like
Lightning Bolt are known the world over, and, you know, developers are
looking at Olneyville.
But some things don't change. This month the RISD Museum
is putting on a show celebrating local artists. Wunderground:
Providence, 1995 to the present features posters by about two hundred
printmakers, many of whom came to the area originally to go to RISD.
These posters promoted shows that took place at underground venues like
Fort Thunder, the Box of Knives, the Cradle of Filth and the Pink
Rabbit. At some point, though, the posters became less about promoting
events and more about abstracting information. You have to look--really
hard, sometimes--to find out, say, what bands were playing, and where,
and what night and what time. Part of this was out of necessity--since
many of the venues weren't legal, they couldn't print actual addresses.
There was also some exclusiveness--if you couldn't decode the poster,
so to speak, then you didn't deserve to go to the show, anyway. And
part of it was out of sheer anarchic creativity and the need to push
boundaries.
Unlike mainstream promotional events, where a poster for
a specific show usually contains a press photo of the main performer
(or at the very least the cover of their latest CD), these prints are
more about surreal typography, glitter, and pictures of birds, to name
some of the more common motifs. It's pretty easy to look at a poster
and, without even reading it, say "Oh, there's another show in
Olneyville." (It's even easier to do that if you see it while you're
getting your coffee at White Electric or eating at Julian's.) Seeing
about two thousand of these posters lined against each other in a
museum will probably reveal more about the prints than you ever
imagined.
Along with the posters, the galleries are going to have
listening stations, where viewers can hear the music of Providence
noise bands. However, the posters aren't only for concerts. They're for
events like Movies With Live Soundtracks and community-based events.
Later, the prints get more political with the advent of Feldco,
Streuver Brothers and other developers reconceiving that part of the
city.
Also, the posters are only half of the show. Eight
artists are currently putting together Shangri-la-la-land, a large
instillation based loosely on the idea of a village. At the beginning
of September they are moving their work into the museum, and for two
weeks you can see them working on it before the show opens on the
15th.
RISD Contemporary Art Curator Judith Tannenbaum proposed
the show when the museum was slated to close for renovations. By making
this the final show in the current incarnation of the museum, the
artists would have the freedom to use the walls and floors without the
museum having to worry about keeping everything right for the following
show. "They create these amazing environments," she says, referring to
wildly decorated venues like Fort Thunder and the Dirt Palace. "I
wanted to allow them as much freedom as possible."
Things change, however. The museum is staying open and
the artists can't ruin the floors. But don't let the imposing RISD
atmosphere lead you to think that the show is being strictly
controlled. As of late July, RISD hadn't even seen any of the
instillation yet.
So what can you expect? Well, it's hard to say. Mat
Brinkman might be making a 16-foot papier-mache self-portrait. Jungil
Hong could be making some sort of hanging terrarium suspended from the
gallery's thirty-foot ceiling. Xander Morro is possibly making
something with peepholes. Jim Drain might be doing something with the
museum's totem pole. Brian Chippendale is maybe making some sort of
tent-store. Leif Goldberg and Erin Rosenthal are definitely
doing…. something. But it's hard to say.
I caught up with artist Pippi Zormosa in early August to
find out what kind of progress was being made on the village. Zormosa
is making lanterns and mahogany relief signs to guide visitors through
the village; she is working in collaboration with metal artist Lu
Heintz. "A lot of it is still up in the air," she says. "It's not about
conceiving something and then just fabricating it." Zormosa stresses
how the different artists' work will react to one another. "People will
probably be making certain parts together so there will be continuity,
but as a whole the pieces are definitely different."
Born in 1978, Zormosa is the youngest of the eight
artists. Five years her senior, Chippendale, Brinkman, and Morro are
the oldest. Seven of the eight went to RISD, and Morro went to Brown.
Not all of them graduated, but most of them still live here. "They are
definitely of a certain generation," Tannenbaum says about how the
artists were chosen. She adds that they have undoubtedly inspired
younger artists to move to the area, and says the artists' anxiousness
to invite others led to the poster portion of the show.
Wunderground will be accompanied by a variety of public
programs, including maskmaking and screenprinting workshops, video
presentations, talks by the artists, and a town meeting about the
redevelopment of Olneyville--an important subject for the artists, many
of whom have been evicted repeatedly in the last five years. The show
may mark the end of an era--with the end of Olneyville as we know it,
and the artists' passage into their thirties--but none of these artists
show any sign of slowing down soon.