Sophistication dukes it out with scruffiness in Chad Wentzel and
a Star-Studded Celebration of Infinitude and Perpetual Beauty, as
it does every weekend in the nice-walls/dirty-floor environment of
Crawl Space Gallery, where Wentzel is one of seven member artists.
Which will win? Neither. In Wentzel’s work and his home venue, it’s the
tension sparked by polished and rough edges forced together that
prevails.
Billed as a romantic evocation in “craft” of the artist’s
self-described blue-collar Tacoma roots and attendant “ordinary
memories,” this show sets an elegant suite of wall-mounted paper works
against a scraggly forest of coarsely threaded sculptures made from
wood and yarn. The latter are held together by god’s eyes, which also
appear, albeit two-dimensionally, in the paper series. Wentzel’s
statement mentions that he first learned how to make a god’s eye in his
third-grade Cub Scout day camp. (Is the joke on me? Where else people
first learn to make god’s eyes, I don’t want to know.)
On paper, Wentzel’s craft is just that: a skillful manipulation of
material and process. There Is a Meadow in the Woods Near Our Fort
by the Pond at the End of the Cul-de-sac Down the Street from Our
House is four intricate cutout views of trees. Each of these is
mounted on another sheet of paper that has been intaglio-printed with a
ghostly cluster of small, monochromatic god’s eyes. The
white-on-white-on-white result is a winning combination of specificity
and blankness, suggesting how the adult mind’s own “eye” might perceive
the childhood meadow of the panels’ title—not retinally but by
conjecture, affectionately “looking” at its object in the past
tense.
Meanwhile, the whiteout continues, as woolly god’s eyes proliferate
across the twigs and branches of a dozen-plus sculptures distributed
throughout the gallery. With appropriately childlike resourcefulness,
this debased, once-sacred craft of Jalisco’s hapless Huichol Indians is
put in service as a structural device. Skinny yarn-jointed sticks point
every which way, but leading where? If it’s not a fully recreated tree
fort we’re encountering, then perhaps these are its fragments, or at
least the remnants of a July afternoon spent tinkering around outside,
exercising the right, so readily relinquished by adults, to make
something out of nothing with whatever is at hand.
Wentzel refers to his installation as a “dreamscape,” its individual
components “commemorating” his memories of Tacoma and beyond. Wood,
fiber, captured moments: Aren’t we venturing dangerously close to
“dream catcher” territory? Thanks to a heavy dose of bathos in the form
of several gross-out titles, this craft nightmare doesn’t come to pass.
When I Was in High School I Knew Some Guys Who Smoked Their Own
Poop. I Think They Had Eaten Drugs and Thought They Could Get High off
the Remaining Drugs in Their Shit. I Don’t Know if It Worked. Check.
It’s pointless to seek narrative links between Wentzel’s formal
choices and the “commemoration” of an experience such as In the
Hotel After My Sister’s Graduation My Mom Found a Dead Mouse in Her
Room. She Called the Front Desk and Asked What They Were Going to Do
About It. They Said Barbecue It. Unlike the deceptively pared down
There Is a Meadow…, which projects a mental image in
increasingly uncanny detail the longer it’s observed, these sculptures
seem intended, when considered closely, to disappear before one’s eyes.
The titles’ details provide no entrée. Together as an
installation—buttressed by repetition and volume, making up the
“dreamscape”—their liminal and even arbitrary character beguiles. But
taken individually, gallery guide in hand, the sculptures leave one
cold, as anecdotes from other people’s dreams often do.
Despite its seemingly throwaway, impossible-to-deliver promise,
Chad Wentzel and a Star-Studded Celebration of Infinitude and
Perpetual Beauty is hardly motivated by cynicism, nor does it
indulge in kitsch. As in his previous show at Crawl Space, the
cut-paper extravaganza Everything I’ve Ever Wanted All at the Same
Time, Wentzel makes a genuine attempt to pin down his euphoria and
share it. His vision is ecstatic. He wants to bring it to the gallery.
And yet, as his own larger-than-life rhetoric acknowledges up front, he
knows that he will fail to. The interest lies in the attempt. That’s a
very honest way of making art about desire. 