By Lawrence Rinder
Wiggin Village is the newest collaborative work by Providence-based
artists Jim Drain and Ara Peterson. Drain and Peterson began working together
nearly ten years ago when they were undergraduates at the Rhode Island School
of Design (RISD). Peterson’s interest in ‘demented assemblage’ and abstract
film combined with Drain’s comic sensibility and enjoyment of craft to create a
powerful, hybrid practice. Both became members of Forcefield, a group of
artists that also included Mat Brinkman and Leif Goldberg and which was known
for high-energy music as well as for visually intense videos, sculptures, and
installations. Forcefield was based at the legendary Fort Thunder, a large
industrial loft in Providence that, between 1995 and 2002, was home to some of
the most innovative art and music made in America in the 1990s. The work
created there--in a wide range of media--is characterized by psychedelic
imagery, primal themes, and a raw, hand-made aesthetic.
Wiggin Village expands on many of Drain’s and Peterson’s earlier
concerns while introducing new techniques, forms, and themes. Both artists have
for years been interested in the evocative nature of everyday, handmade
materials. Their work is characterized by time-consuming processes that result
in physically compelling and optically rich forms which often incorporate
‘craft-like’ components such as beads, yarn, or clay. Drain, whose early work
was largely in sculpture and comics, began to knit shrouds—often incorporating
found afghans-- or his fellow Forcefield band members in 2000. In Wiggin
Village, these knit shrouds have come to cover a host of diverse abstract
personages. Meanwhile, Peterson’s painstaking creation of abstract videos and
films using sections of multi-colored modelling clay is further developed in Wiggin
Village through work that extends this bizarre 2-D effect into an even more
peculiar three-dimensional form.
In Wiggin Village,
there is a particular emphasis on architecture, or as Drain and Peterson
describe it, a ‘cartoon architecture.’ Although this approach may be new to
their installation work, it was prefigured in the remarkable interior design of
Fort Thunder, where each resident designed and created their own sleeping area,
often to quite fantastical ends. Wiggin Village itself fills The Moore
Space with various architectural motifs including platforms, arches, gateways,
and turrets, transforming an ordinary former commercial loft into a childlike
wonderland. The artists have pointed to a combination of extravagance and
minimal pattern that evokes qualities of Islamic architecture and surface
decoration. The scenographic dimension of Wiggin Village—and of Fort
Thunder itself--was inspired, in part, by the legendary work of Gary Panter, an
illustrator and comic artist who is best known as the designer of the sets for
the TV series Pee Wee’s Playhouse. Panter’s free-spirited imagery and
forms which veered between cheerful innocence and dystopian revolt anticipates
the range of approaches—“from the eye-fuck to the organic”--in Drain and
Peterson’s work. By giving the viewers’ the ability to move through and
personalize their experience of this ‘comic architecture,’ Drain and Peterson
bring to life the now-common experience of navigating through the fantasy worlds
of computer-video games.
Amongst the rococo
concatenation of Wiggin Village, the artists have placed discrete works
that become the inhabitants and incidents of this strange community. These
works include Peterson’s video projections and abstract beaded abstract forms,
and Drain’s totem-like objects covered with knitted shrouds. While occurring in
what might seem like a very otherworldly space, the inspiration for many of
these works lies in the real world of people, plants, and animals. Notes on their
sketches for the works suggest their naturalistic origin: Graveyard, Fountain,
Bumps, Treetops. Other notes point towards more fantastical identities: Piggy
Pony, Diamond Garden, Sweet Surrender, Arch Enemy, Pure Evil. One note, “maybe
persons,” suggests the virtually anthropormorphic quality of nearly all of
their work. There is a sense that every piece, whether physically figure-like
or utterly abstract, is a manifestation of some independent, often un-nameable
sentient force.
Like Third Annual Rogga
Bogga, Wiggin Village possesses a subliminal narrative element.
However, whereas the shrouded beings in the Whitney installation clearly formed
a kind of surrogate audience attending the screening of one of Peterson’s
abstract films, the narrative thread of Wiggin Village is less overt or
clearly identifiable. What is clear is that each form or image leads to another
in a chain of relations that seems based as much on rhymes of color and shape
as on any kind of storyline. In the artists’ words, Wiggin Village is
“an arrangement where a variable speed happens, paced by scale, patterning, and
color.” Arguably, this approach to linear progression, tempered by the formal
differences among sequential incidents, echoes the graphic qualities of Fort
Thunder comics. The comic work that emerged from this scene was characterized
by the expressive qualities of hand-drawn lines, suggestions of narrative the
emerged from subtle transformations of form, and by an attention to the
overall—often highly congested—appearance of the page.
Abstraction has been present
in Drain and Peterson’s work for some time, most recently in their
extraordinary video kaleidoscope and accompanying sculptural spheres. In Wiggin
Village, several elements extend their investigation into the peculiar
resonance and optical power of pattern and shape. Again, notes to their
preliminary sketches provide clues into their way of seeing these objects:
Donut Forms, Cone Forms, Sphere Forms, Wiggle Forms. In a statement written as
the show was in development, the artists’ anticipate that, “The forms
themselves will have a grace of labor, a clunky elegance and a clean economy of
materials.” Interestingly, both Drain and Peterson seem to be re-engaging with
some of the formalist concerns they first encountered—and initially rejected—at
RISD, where artists such as Tony Cragg and Martin Puryear were celebrated by
the faculty.
In Wiggin Village,
Drain and Peterson attempt a delicate balancing act: it is a collaboration in
which each of these very idiosyncratic artist’s work is distinct and
identifiable. Their shared fascination with the resonance of form and
consciousness, with the tension between dimensions of representation, and with
the subliminal suggestion of narrative allow them to work side by side in
creating a carnivalesque riot of the imagination that is, at the same time, a
thoughtful and integrated whole.