Artistic collaborations have become increasingly common in recent
years as the idea of art as the distilled, hard-won aesthetic honey of
suffering worker-bee geniuses has been replaced by a cooler (and
possibly more realistic) idea of art as research, or objectified
philosophy. With performance and mixed media, teamwork and the division
of labor make good sense, and nobody’s ontological survival is on the
line any more, at least officially.
This Long Road brings together three ceramic sculptors
— Ben Belknap, Crystal Morey, and Derek
Weisberg — who met in art school and have worked
independently with the figure since then. While their individual styles
can be easily discerned in the larger, collaborative pieces, they work
together, like musicians playing in harmony or counterpoint. Belknap’s
caricatures of a variety of physical types contrast nicely with his
colleagues’ trademark figures — prim, skeptical, fine-boned nudes
by Morey, and hairless babies or old men, comically melancholic, by
Weisberg. (Also on view are solo pieces by each artist, or by various
duos.)
Art history meets contemporaneity in these works, some of which
recall traditional European carved reliefs, altars and sarcophagi,
though invaded, inexplicably, by less-then-exalted modern comic
personages. Narrative explanations are up to the viewers, as the
titles, e.g., “So Close Yet So Far,” “Forest Families VIII,” and “Into
Days Yet Unknown XVIIII,” are suggestively ironic, with their Roman
numerals implying obsessive repetition, without being definitive. The
large installation that provides the show’s name features more than
twenty small works that seem as random and odd as life: heads on
stages/shelves or in niches; women with hands sprouting winglike from
their shoulders, or extending tendril-like from their necks as fingered
bodies. In two untitled works, Belknap juxtaposes surprised-appearing
male and female heads that are contained within small roofed cabins; in
a similar grouping, three portrait busts set on shelves beneath arched
enclosures suggest opera boxes, baptismal fonts, and Renaissance
paintings extruded into 3D; and his asbestos-suited oil-field worker
stands impassively amid flames that looks suspiciously like jalapeno
peppers, an icon of cool (or dumb). In “This Long Road II,” a
ruminative Morey heroine stands between two gesticulating Weisberg
schlemiels (the Yiddishism is irresistible) while two huge hands offer
benedictions; in another, a female Morey Baptism is heralded by a
morose angelic Weisberg choir. This Long Road runs
through October 11 at the Compound Gallery (6604 San Pablo Ave.,
Oakland). TheCompoundGallery.com or
510-655-9019
