Julia Couzens and Ellen Van Fleet's LUMPEN

After a wonderful talk featuring the artists, Julia Couzens and Ellen Van Fleet, on Thursday evening, the gallery was unlocked and we were given the privilege of viewing LUMPEN, which is currently showing in the Robert Else Gallery at Sacramento State through April 16th.  

The exhibit features a work by each artist and was overall inspired by the sculptural works of Ellen Van Fleet from the seventies.  The two works converse with one another in the space, and although they are quite individual, they seem to relate to one another.

Both artists use common materials and avoid any overt meaning.

Pictured below are Untitled by each artist, Couzens on the left and Van Fleet on the right, and were created for the announcement for LUMPEN.

Julia Couzens and Ellen Van Fleet, Untitled, dog hair, wire, Scotch tape, a thing, price tag, plastic and thread.

Ellen Van Fleet's contribution to the project is The Bowerbird's Sister.  Van Fleet's installation is created largely by bending and weaving manzanita and was largely inspired by her works from the seventies and her recent move to another city.

Ellen Van Fleet, The Bowerbird's Sister.

The Bowerbird's Sister includes an interesting form of audience participation where observers can request the items in the basket of the installation.  The artist said that she saw this aspect of her work as a way of getting rid of things she no longer wanted, but still liked.  To me, this portion of the work also speaks to the things we collect in our lives.  The bowerbird that Van Fleet references collects items to attract a mate and it's interesting how humans have similar objects that they keep for one reason or another and they can be found in the basket; books, phones, etc.  The Bowerbird's Sister is beautifully crafted and it has a sweeping kind of movement to it that makes it feel alive.

Ellen Van Fleet, Detail of The Bowerbird's Sister.

Julia Couzens' contribution to the work is the yet unfinished Standing on the Feet of Pistoletto, Memory Conspires to Mobilize a Blanket of Dreams.  Her work is a messy, convoluted, fascinating configuration of textiles and objects on a bed-like form, with a fencing wire grid standing up from the surface.  I am fascinated by how the objects seem to be climbing, clambering up the fencing wire, like it's a latter to some greater consciousness.

Julia Couzens, Standing on the Feet of Pistoletto, Memory Conspires to Mobilize a Blanket of Dreams.

The "feet" the bed sits on are cloth-covered stacked bricks influenced by Michelangelo Pistoletto. They seem to hold a special kind of weight, not just on the bottom of the piece, but in the way the orange bricks are tied to (anchoring or climbing?) the wire fencing.  When looking at each piece of Couzens' installation, I start to feel like all of the rope and string are not so much tied and anchored, but pulling the pieces together.  I will be interested to see how this installation evolves and to see how it reveals itself to the artist.

Julia Couzens, Details of Standing on the Feet of Pistoletto, 

Memory Conspires to Mobilize a Blanket of Dreams.

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"There's Richness In The Chaos": Julia Couzens and Ellen Van Fleet on LUMPEN

Thursday evening I attended a talk for the LUMPEN installation currently on view in the Robert Else Gallery at Sacramento State.  Afterwards, I also attended a showing of LUMPEN in the gallery and that will be expanded on in another post.

View in the Robert Else Gallery.

LUMPEN, made up of two parts, was created by artists Julia Couzens and Ellen Van Fleet.  The works were inspired by Van Fleet's early work in the sixties and seventies.  Both artists use everyday found items.  Aptly, the talk on the installation was divided but also singular, the artists separately speaking about their work and their history and then joining together at the end for a Q and A session with the rapt audience.


"I'm fairly simple and I'm really curious," Ellen Van Fleet said, explaining that she's interested in the simplest, most direct way to convey an idea.  After working as a gift wrapper in a shop for the blind, Van Fleet experimented with gift wrap and chicken wire, a familiar material from her childhood.  She liked the way the paper seemed to breathe, but that was really more of a result, than a purpose, Van Fleet explained.  She was interested in shadow with her lattice sculptures, and in her Talking Wires piece she worked with pipe cleaners, paper towels, q tips, and other easily found materials.  She explained that to her, Talking Wires formed its own language.  In another installation from the seventies, New York City Animal Levels, Van Fleet concentrated on the life that is all around us, in our walls, showcasing rats, mice, cats, pigeons, and cockroaches.  According to Van Fleet, she "interspersed these very austere ideas with...convoluted looking at my naval kind of stuff."

(center) Ellen Van Fleet after the LUMPEN talk.

Julia Couzens, whose point of reference is in drawing, says that she is "more interested in discovery" than anything else.  She wants to discover forms that interest and thrill her.  When working with a material, she wants to see what that thing really is and then amplify that quality.  She wants the material to "reveal" themselves to her.  "It's like harvesting that energy from life," she says.   Couzens is well-known for her energetic, suspended Bundles.  They are "their own sort of constellation," Couzens says.  She realizes that she starts with the form of a grid, gradually deconstructing and disturbing it, and that she is highly interested in line.

"I don't want to know what I'm doing," Couzens says, explaining that there is nothing more dull to her than working with art conventions and knowing exactly what she is doing.  She says that while working, her dialogue with herself is mostly asking the question, "Am I really present?"

A Bundle by Julia Couzens from String Theory 

at the Huntington Beach Art Center,

 courtesy of the Huntington Beach Art Center.

On her piece for the installation, Standing on the Feet of Pistoletto, Memory Conspires to Mobilize A Blanket of Dreams, she says she will continue to work on it because she it hasn't revealed itself to her yet.  The piece incorporates cloth-wrapped bricks, which were inspired by the Arte Povera artist, Michaelangelo Pistoletto.  While the Arte Povera artworks were making an ironic political statement, Couzens says "I'm not ironic, I'm ironic as a person."


As for the works in LUMPEN, they will be recycled and reformed, according to the artists.

LUMPEN can be viewed in the Robert Else Gallery at Sacramento State through April 16th.

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Commune at the Union Gallery

Commune: Art by the FORM Collective has been on view this month in the Union Gallery at Sacramento State and will be showing through this coming Thursday.  The exhibit displays a variety of style, medium, and subject matter.  These artists' works, however, seem to come together as a group under the use of bright expressive colors and expressionistic brushwork.

Mustafa Shaheen, Claire R., Oil on Canvas.

The FORM Collective is composed of student artists who came together to create art as a collective in the summer of 2014.  There seems to be connections to Art History in their pieces.  Claire R., the above painting by Mustafa Shaheen, bares a resemblance to the brightly multicolored faces of fauvist painters, especially in the portraits painted by André Derain with his painterly brush strokes.  Some of the same ideas but conceptualized completely differently is the mixed media painting below, Madonna of the Demon Breasts 2.  John Chanthaphone utilizes the same kinds of colors in his work but uses them to highlight the figure, instead of using them to create it.

John Chanthaphone, Detail of Madonna of the Demon Breasts 2, 

Mixed Media on Canvas.

In the detail of the painting below, the observer can see similar influences.  The thick application of paint echos Claire R. and post-impressionistic painters.  The bright colors also continue in this painting, but again, the way that hey are used is distinct in Lindsey McGrath's Midnight Storm.  The deep blues and reds contrast and create an eerie scene.  The deep red in the figure's shoes take on a bloody look and the inky blues evoke a dark, stormy, hopeless night.  The mixture of the colors in the leg of the figure (white, blue, purple, green, red and yellow at first glance) create an interesting play against the deep jewel tones of the shoes and ground.

Lindsey McGrath, Detail of Midnight Storm, Oil on Panel.

One of the most enrapturing works for me at this showing, was the painting on paper below, Grandmother by Caiti Chan.  The abstract painting forms the face of an elderly woman, her face white and his eyes and mouth a bright orchid purple.  This painting is abstract, but it calls to me for other reasons.  I can't tell what the grandmother's eyes look like, what she might be trying to tell me, but I can't help but feel like they're deeply sad, and I can't help looking at her.

Caiti Chan, Grandmother, House Paint on Paper.

Collective: Art by the FORM Collective will be on view in the Union Gallery at Sacramento State through March 19th. 

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