Discarded objects provide media to artists

BANGOR – For most of us, a box of rusty tools or a stack of weathered books are a nuisance – something for the garbage heap, perhaps, and certainly beyond practical use.

Mildred Johnson and David McLaughlin, however, see treasure in all that trash.

The two Maine-based artists are paired together in a new University of Maine Museum of Art show that explores the beauty of rust and age, and the intricacy of how objects are combined to create new meaning.

“Reclaimed: Works by Mildred Johnson & David McLaughlin” opened last week, along with other exhibits of the works of painter Angelo Ippolito and the photographs of Andy Warhol.

George Kinghorn, who took over this summer as UMMA’s director, said it has been several years since UMMA put up a sculpture show.

In his explorations of Maine art and attempts to assemble new exhibits, Kinghorn visited both Johnson, who has a studio in Brunswick, and McLaughlin, who works in Liberty. He saw enough parallels to pair the two in a show.

There are 14 hanging pieces by Johnson and three freestanding works, two of which were created specifically for the UMMA show, by McLaughlin.

For Kinghorn, the similarities between the two artists wasn’t just that both artists use found objects with plenty of rusty, dusty history. It was the manner in which the works are created.

“If you visit their studios, they live with a lot of these things [around them],” he said. “They have all of these possibilities they can investigate in putting these things together. [The objects] are not just thrown together. There are careful choices the artists make in bringing all these random things together for one cohesive vision and to create a statement.”

Johnson’s “Time To Go” utilizes two main items, a washboard and a set of oarlocks, the U-shaped devices that secure oars on a rowboat. The items are old-fashioned – who uses a washboard anymore? – but the arrangement is new, showing off the texture of the board, and the way in which Johnson hung the locks casts interesting shadows on the washboard.

In McLaughlin’s “Peddler’s Cart of the Post-Apocalypse,” one of the works he created for the show, he assembles items such as leather gloves, a trunk, and rakes in a peddler’s cart. There are elements of the whimsical, such as the glass-eyed fish with what appears to be airplane wings on its back serving as a kind of antenna, but there’s also a darker feeling to the piece. The way in which McLaughlin arranged a set of picks make the old tools seem like a bony, spiny back.

“[The pieces] speak to the idea of the artist as a collector of discarded objects that have their own shape and history, and then bringing these things all together,” Kinghorn said.

The recurring shape in almost all the works of both artists is the circle, which appears most often as a wheel. It’s an apt symbol – go backward and you get Johnson’s and McLaughlin’s interest in old objects, go forward and you have their new combinations of those objects.

The works may be a mixture of the folksy and the contemporary, but Kinghorn sees connections in the art to decidedly nonfolksy artists such as Picasso, Robert Rauschenberg and pioneering assemblage artist Joseph Cornell.

In the showing of eight works by the Abstract Expressionist Ippolito, Kinghorn was hoping to display a range of Ippolito’s works, from the more severe, hard-edged abstraction to gestural strokes inspired by the landscapes, and the so-called “Regatta” series of sails and boating.

Four of the paintings were donated to UMMA by Ippolito’s family members, including his son Jon Ippolito, an assistant professor of new media at the University of Maine.

UMMA also put up 11 photographs from a group it received from the Andy Warhol Photographic Legacy Program. “Celebrities and Socialites: Photographs by Andy Warhol” includes shots of musician Ric Ocasek, golfer Jack Nicklaus, and actress Margaret Hamilton in her Wicked Witch costume from “The Wizard of Oz.”

In addition, the museum has mounted different works from its permanent collection, including a drawing by Marsden Hartley, etchings by John Marin, a color lithograph by Henry Moore, a lithography by Willem de Kooning, and gelatin silver prints by Berenice Abbott.

Showing off different pieces is key for the museum’s ability to stay relevant.

“I really feel like for the community and to link to the art students on campus, [people] need to see things from the two-dimensional to the three-dimensional, photography, painting, sculpture, the whole array of visual art disciplines,” Kinghorn said. “… I believe that as we rotate [special exhibitions] the permanent collection has to rotate, too.”

The three shows will close Jan. 3, 2009. For more call 561-3350 or visit www.umma.umaine.edu.

jbloch@bangordailynews.net

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