CINE16.COMSomeone told me it was an old mental institution. Someone else said horse stables. The truth of the matter is that Mad Art, one of St. Louis’ most prominent and eccentric art galleries, is housed in none other than an old police station. The original signs are still up, so if you don’t look closely you might confuse it for a fuzz outpost. The venue, art itself, can easily overshadow the pieces within. At last Friday night’s opening, people of all ages could see these forces at work, the symbiotic and sometimes rival relationship between art and architecture.
Three artists showed their work at last night’s soiree. The first and least of which was Cory Wesler, whose untitled work bulged in beanbag-esque mediocrity through holding cells and floors. Wesler’s work, familiar from last year’s “Venus Envy” show, bears a striking similarity to those popular chairs from the 1980s. The bags intertwine, they pile, they do nothing. Comments of passing viewers nicely summarize the affair. “There is something distinctly wrong in an installation that won’t let you play in this,” remarked one onlooker of “Untitled II,” a tumid bunch of beanbags swelling behind bars. “I could use one of those in my office,” quipped another. Indeed, the cell containing the work was far more interesting than the work itself, which rather resembled a Stephanie Tanner slumber party. Its seafoam walls are etched with prisoner graffiti, while bars of the same shade cloister Wesler’s work safely away.
In the cell next door, paintings decidedly indebted to Latin American folk art are on parade. After a “10-year hiatus” artist Rick Ulman has returned to the art world, replete with an impressive white beard and a guitar, which he did in fact play at the opening. Most of Ulman’s paintings have an almost quilt like pattern to them, i.e. giant canvases full of smaller patterns. The colors are vibrant, and most reminiscent of the folk art, while some of the patterns look almost like Keith Haring’s. There are stylized hearts, pills, lips. Somehow unexpected from the towering, construction boot-clad artist, but all the more intriguing for it.
The show stealer, however, was Tim Garrett. His photographs include images of hands in odd arrangements, photos of hands throwing apples, images arranged into Atari shapes, and, last but not least, images of gallery-going people. Yet there’s something more important about Garrett’s oeuvre: it consists entirely of photo-booth images.
His ardor for the booth all started at the Joplin mall, when Garrett was but a high schooler. As he recounts, he found a photo strip of a couple passionately necking in the booth, which he saved in his wallet. Even more stunning to Garrett than the pairs’ hairstyles was the intimacy afforded by the photo booth. “I think people feel comfortable doing things in the privacy of the booth that they wouldn’t do in front of a regular camera.” The intrigue persisted through college, when Garrett was at Brown and taking photo classes at RISD. During that epoch he frequently traveled to the Children’s Museum of Boston, where there was a photo booth. He experimented with techniques, taking pictures of himself and objects in the booth, piecing photos together into new patterns, until the Children’s Museum, failing to understand Garrett’s art, requested that he not return.
Garrett continued experimenting with booth photography for years. As he related to Cadenza, upon the advent of his wedding reception, he looked into renting a photo booth but realized to his chagrin that the price was not right. Ultimately he decided to buy a booth and rent it out to recover the revenue. So came the booth to Mad Art. Not only was the wedding reception a hit, so was Garrett’s recent project, “My Father’s Frames.” For the project, Garrett asked gallery goers to don the frames of his father’s glasses and pose in the booth, telling a story within the four frames. He hung the first hundred (also made into a book) in Mad Art, encouraging newcomers to perpetuate the project. The results are unedited and uncanny. As augured by Garrett, the booth lends itself to a sort of spontaneous creativity. The displayed frames show everything from stories of love children to bared breasts to an appearance by the one and only Beatle Bob. Last night’s crowd lined up outside the booth to tell their own stories, while Garrett mingled amongst them in a bow tie. It’s participatory and it poses a moral dilemma: to keep the photos or give them up to the art? Though the spirit of the project is light-hearted, it does make one think about art and materialism, as well as an entire host of other subjects.
The show will be at Mad Art through November 16, and it’s worth it to stop by. Mad Art also shows films on Thursday evenings (see Cadenza film section), and its schedule is available online at www.madart.com.