Colin Chase (review)

Colin Chase, Praise Poem #1, 1995, wood, steel, copper, and brass, 30" x 14 1/2" x 34", courtesy June Kelly Gallery, New York. COLIN CHASE JUNE KELLY GALLERY NEW YORK Recently, mainstream institutions in a periodic attempt to address multicultural issues and audiences, have begun to present exhibitions which set up a range of analytical structures in order to examine work done by others (African Americans, gays, women, etc.); in an attempt to gauge the sociological , or political nature of difference. Some of these shows have been organized in good faith, but despite any merit they may have in terms of providing a certain kind of academic information, an unfortunate corollary effect has been to situate and maintain work by minority artists as a problematical practice. Such a positioning tends to objectify the artists and diminish their production, loosing them in a kind of ahistorical setting. This situation represents yet another cui de sac for artists elided from an integral -art/historical place or role within the standard modernist and post-modernist canons. Challenging this tendency to ascribe qualitative limitations based upon race and gender are a number of young artists such as Kerry James Marshall, Renee Green, Willie Cole, and ari Ward whose projects have bypassed the notion or restrictiveness of marginality that once would have automatically assigned them to the edges of contemporary discourse. Colin Chase joins this group with work that is simultaneously expansive and focused as to the audiences it addresses. Constructing a kind of aesthetic and philosophical nexus that consolidates his interests in a range of Western and non-Western art and ideas, Chase has subtly integrated multiple threads of history and experience ranging from Native American culture to African and Asian philosophy. As an artist whose cultural background and complex social history is shared by many people of African descent, Chase's sculpture and installations often elicit spiritual recognition along with the pure pleasure of an aesthetic response. Like certain African religious objects, many of Chase's sculptures take form by using an additive method in which shovels, pitch-forks, salad bowls, chains or other common tools and objects acquire visual and metaphorical substance. The hybridity of his sculpture may be taken as a visual parallel to the complexity of cultural influence and effect. Spiritual and secular, Western and non-Western, art and artifact, Colin Chase's sculptures become abstract or symbolic points of contact between the metaphysical and concrete realms of art and culture . One aspect of Chase's recent exhibition of new work at the June Kelly Gallery that often perplexes viewers is the apparent craftedness of his objects. Another quality that viewers find unsettling is the disconcerting newness of the fixtures, industrial odds and ends, tools and wood which all form part of his constructed sculptures. This may be especially puzzling to those who have grown to view funky, worn surfaces as evidence of seriousness or modernity. Often forgotten is that the use of crude materials and casual surfaces introduced early in the century by Dada practitioners such as Schwitters and Duchamp, was in large part, a transgressive reaction to modernity, not an effect of it. In an anxious counter-response to the oppressive machined perfection of incipient modernism, these artists reacted by channeling their creativity through the irrational and the intuitive. The objects they made of used or casual materials was a way of denying the rational progressiveness of the machine and scientific-age. After all, the recent 'Great War' with its innovative development of tools for technological devastation had driven Western civilization almost to the brink of collapse. Although Chase has a particular interest in tools, and he constructs his objects with found material as several other young artists such as Nari Ward or Terry Adkins do, he is more interested in the clarity of facture which amplifies form. Objects used in his work such as axes or steel joint fixtures are industrially manufactured and "found" new in hardware stores. He doesn't care particularly about ideas of consumption or about Arte Povera-type accumulations of material. With his tools plus elements of nature such as feathers, hemp, bones, and earth, the artist works an exp~~ssive synergy...