"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.