Sculpture and paintings by James Watts | Paintings by David Anderson and Marcellina Kim
Art Brut is alive and well in the sculptures of James Watts. Although the
artist owes an obvious debt to Jean Dubuffet, his work has a peculiar voice
of its own, emerging from the scraps of metal debris he nails together into
exotic forms.
There isn't anything pretentious or high-minded about Watts' one-man show
on exhibit at the Debra Owen gallery through June 13. The simple execution
of his raw, sculptural objects never hides behind the smoke screen of art
theory loaded with jargon, smacking of a privileged academia.
Throughout the show, Watts' treatment of his subject matter takes on a
childlike perspective of the world. Part assemblage, part photo montage,
these humorous pieces of recycled metal aren't really part of Marcel
Duchamp's tradition of found objects as art. Rather, Watts' resurrected
detritus is a means to an end for cryptic designs spilling forth from the
artist's imagination.
Like the title of the piece "Green Eggs & Ham, a Homage to Dr. Seuss"
suggests, Watts fashions a makeshift egg. The piece's rough and beautifully
tactile, aluminium surface is covered with photo-derived imagery. Likewise,
the rudimentary still-life composition of his painting "Large Egg" depicts
a slab of green ham and a pair of fried eggs sitting on a plate.
With "Or," Watts' figure crawls on all fours with one arm caught in
mid-stride. There is also an implied, free-frame of action in the piece
"Atlas," with its standing figure clutching a metal, globelike sphere above
its head. This piece is probably the most revealing example of Watts' work.
It is almost as if the artist were trying to graft the whole world onto the
figure's body like a second skin.
Watts doesn't take himself too seriously. There is a folksy sense of humor
in how he handles his figurative forms. They aren't meant to be realistic
representations of humanity, so much as a child's unconscious memory
blurred with fragmented faces and playful, mass-media ghosts.
Watts' pseudo-child's perspective, however, isn't very successful in his
paintings of crudely rendered figures and objects stranded in neutral
landscapes. The blunt descriptive nature of his paintings' titles also
inadvertently reveals the lack of subtext in his imagery. In "Three Birds,"
Watts places a trio of red birds in a flat landscape, and "Two Bread"
follows suit with its rendering of two slices of white bread standing under
a bluish-gray sky.
Watts is more in his element with the intimate, metal sculptures that hold
the viewer's attention with their strange surfaces. As you simultaneously
take in the sculptures' overall form, the small, photographic details read
like puzzles composed of random faces and limbs removed from their original
contexts.
Shoe shows
In an adjacent corridor of the Debra Owen gallery, there is a small suite
of artists David Anderson and Marcellina Kim's paintings on display through
July 5. Like Watts, both artists work with images subverting their origins
in pop culture and advertising.
Many of Kim's paintings use shoes as surrogates for the human figure. Each
pair of shoes exudes a carefree personality that dominates its individual,
pictorial space. This is best expressed in such works as "Cherry Pickers,"
"Mango Ape" and "Sugar & Spice."
Instead of being a series of still lifes, her images are closer to
portraiture where sneakers and a variety of women's shoes strike amusing
poses. In these paintings, Kim has also rendered a single piece of fruit
that hovers over the expressive footwear.
While the humor of Kim's self-conscious shoes is pretty straightforward,
Anderson's paintings traffic in mysterious wordplay juxtaposed against his
odd, storybooklike imagery. In "Biological Diversity," the small, collaged,
photo of performance artist Rachel Rosenthal's bald head is at the end of a
circular, food chain composed of amoebas and fishes. The weird arrangement
of elements is nicely painted but puzzling.
Humorous non sequiturs abound in "Bobo, Puff and Spot," where Anderson
paints a luminescent pair of children's pajamas floating against a muted
crimson sky. Across the top of the piece, the artist has scribbled: "Django
wore these jammees and played guitar. The bear's name is Bobo, the bunny's
name is Puff and the doggy's name is Spot. . . . Hence the title of this
painting: Bobo, Puff and Spot."
For the most part, Anderson's art avoids the trap of being one-liners
through the weird pull of his often cryptic, image-and-text combinations.
His streak of absurdist humor is most potent in "Cognitive Therapy" with
its sleepy face peeking out of the red skin of an otherworldly cherry.
This anthropomorphic fruit floats above a small T-shirt, shorts and white
socks. Beneath this strange combo of objects, Anderson tosses out yet
another of his funny, little witticisms: "David Anderson has lost all sense
of reality. This painting is an attempt at cognitive therapy." In light of
his work's bizarre bent, the viewer isn't sure if the artist is completely
joking.
ART REVIEW
Sculpture and paintings by James Watts; paintings by David Anderson and
Marcellina Kim.
3 to 8 p.m. Thursday through Saturday; Debra Owen Gallery, 354 11th St.,
ReinCarnation Project, downtown (Watts exhibition runs through June 13;
Anderson and Kim exhibition runs through July 5). Free. (619) 231-3030.
Copyright Union-Tribune Publishing Co.
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