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About Eugene weekly. (Eugene, Oregon) 1993-current | View Entire Issue (April 8, 2004)
BY SYLVIE PEDERSEN Spontaneous Surrealism MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM Full Bar Organic Café Mam Coffee Organic Menu for Lunch & Dinner Wireless Internet Locally Owned & Operated MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM P piece itself as in Dogon Mother and Child. layfulness and humor — such is the On the other hand, Tic-Tac-Toe is more first impression Jerry Harris’ sculp- clearly derived from the piece itself with its tures impart — an absurdist, surre- three blocks of wood and knobs illustrating alistic, cerebral and often dark, playfulness in the Surrealist tradition how the mind and humor. Harris’s exhibition of collage free-associates. and sculpture at the Jacobs Gallery closes The Executioner’s Song combines both this Saturday, April 10. carved wood and clay forms. A slim rod Harris himself describes his work as sur- hangs from a beam surmounting two poles realist. One should not think of Dali or and ends with a clay shape that evokes a Magritte’s naturalistic surrealism, however, stylized cow-head (and Picasso’s bike sad- but rather of Miró and Jean Arp’s abstract dle of a bull). Two parallel strings stretched surrealism with its biomorphic shapes and between knobs frame the central rod. This its predominant concept of automatic or is a powerful piece and strikingly similar to intuitive work mode. “I totally work from Harris’ earlier Homage to the Muscogee the subconscious,” Harris said, “with no Indians War Of 1812-13. preconceived ideas about my sculpture.” Lady Sings the Blues: Homage to Billy The Jacobs Gallery’s exhibition of Holliday includes a single stalk covered Harris’ recent work includes a dozen col- with rounded clay protu- lages and some 15 sculp- berances which are easy tures. The latter are con- to anthropomorphize structions assembled out into tiny breasts or slight of variously combined buttocks while wooden media: polished carved knobs evoke the keys of wood; sculpted clay a wind instrument. encased in fiberglass and Because Harris’ painted uniformly sculptures are conceived brown; manufactured and created as construc- objects such as string, tions, the artist finds col- wooden utensils and lage to be a similar wooden knobs, dowels, process. “It’s a building rods, staffs, buttons, pins, process,” he explains, spools in all sizes and “using the same additive shapes. Many of the and subtractive sculptures stand on long sequence of sculpture.” thin legs like a new breed Harris’ collages are of tall wading birds. mostly triptychs with Although Harris bold color schemes warns us to not take his using one or two domi- titles too literally or read nant colors beside black too much into them — and white, often com- they are often sponta- bining primary colors neous in the tradition of (red and yellow) or com- the Surrealists — their plementary ones (red connotations are and green). They com- nonetheless inescapable The Executioner’s Song, bine abstract and figura- even when there is no sculpture by Jerry Harris. tive elements, organic obvious link with the MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM Sculptor Jerry Harris at the Jacobs. and the fantasy at the heart of improvisation. Beyond literature and the arts, Harris’ work also invokes a variety of socio-cultural issues, from the and geometric question of a future shaped by tech- shapes into abstract nology to cultural minorities and racial issues. Windows of Old New compositions that sometimes acquire a York Ca. 1937 is a particularly suc- cessful example. Three prints of the cubic edge. Repetition on a same collage are juxtaposed land- scape-wise over an off-white back- triple beat is used as a basic structural ground. The dominant color is black with some with, red, orange device for the trip- tychs. Nausea is an and green accents. The prints appear to be based on a photograph example of this gen- eral pattern. Harris of ads for the Dixie Theatre posted on a facetted cylindrical structure: created a first collage, which here includes a “Strike in the Mines! Coal Police! Men, Women and Children Die of title-page fragment from Sartre’s Nausea Hunger! The Greatest Show Ever Made About Miners: ‘Black Fury.’” and cutouts from images of Francis The text allows Harris to refer to Lady Sings the Blues: the plight of both miners and Bacon’s paintings. He Homage to Billy Holliday, scanned and printed African-Americans through the con- sculpture by Jerry Harris. notations of the word “black.” Harris this collage in tripli- cate then built over each print a second layer has drawn a grid of window panes over the prints and added bits of color into some of the of mixed-media marks and collaged materi- als. This second layer adds similar but not windows creating the illusion of a cityscape at night. We are looking into a series of visu- identical elements to each “panel” of the trip- tych – here fragments of French poetry. The al and cultural frames; whatever social reali- ty is hinted at has been transposed and trans- finished collages were then affixed to black and white paper frames placed over a black muted through various media. Harris thus succeeds in weaving an elab- background. In Dance Theater of Harlem, another triptych, a single image repeated at orate multicultural web that brings together America, Europe and Africa. Harris’ artistic different angles and enclosed in geometrical shapes succeeds in evoking ethereal bodies in background is indeed international. He stud- ied in London and the US and lived in movement. Sweden until recently. His work is in the Dizzy G Playin High Yellow follows a Swedish National Art Collection and he has different format. Prints of a collage are placed side-by-side over an off-white back- exhibited throughout Europe and the US: “My work doesn’t say ‘African-American.’ ground to create a single landscape format. The collage elements include fragments It’s universal.” If some of his sculptures show African influence, so does much of modern from music sheets and texts and are repeat- ed in a series of panels of unequal width that art. “I was influenced by Henry Moore, whom I met in the ’70s in London, and he function like measure bars. A face-and- wind-instrument cutout is altered in a Cubist was himself influenced by African art.” In the end, though, there is one determin- manner and further transformed from meas- ing factor, deceptively simple, that fuels ure to measure. The overall effect suggests Harris’ art: “I think,” he says, “what I have high energy, rhythm and syncopation; it captures at once the repetition inherent to kept in a certain way is my vision as a child — that sort of surprise in front of things.” ew rhythm; the variations necessary to music MMM MM MM MMMM MMMM MMMMMM 13th & M Oak (formerly Field’s) • 434-6553 APRIL 8, 2004 29
