Misstropolis

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Look Again: The Art of Rachel Perry Welty

by Robin Hauck

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In almost any other house a tower of toilet paper reaching to the ceiling of a guest bathroom could seem by turns practical or problematic. Perhaps owner of said bathroom had recently been to BJ’s, or had bad Mexican last night. In the compellingly deliberate environment of artist Rachel Perry Welty’s home, however, the soft white tower of domestic, hygienic and commercial connotations looms like a totem pole reaching to the Great Grocery Store in the sky. In Welty’s hands, just about anything can make a person think.

Welty’s art coaxes ordinarily devalued objects and behavior out of their familiar settings and re-introduces them in provocative new ways. Her meticulously produced works address complex themes like domesticity, identity, privacy and language with the simplest materials. This calculated contradiction evokes a spectrum of surprise, laughter, and self reflection in the viewer and has led to increasing attention for Welty in the contemporary art world.

After working in the advertising industry for years, serious complications related to the health of a family member upended her life and energized the critical observer inside her. She attended the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, winning the school’s Traveling Scholars Award twice. At art school she says, her mind “cracked open.” Now she is awake to the impulses which ultimately become her art. In her home “non-studio” and her studio in Boston’s Fort Point Channel she lets projects develop, often surprised at the result.

Twist ties, bread tabs, styrofoam take-out containers and verbal sentiments, normally the detritus of daily life, replace traditional materials. Take for example the stickers from groceries purchased over the course of a year - not normally the stuff of collectors’ or curators’ dreams. But in the mobile installation bu$, 2007, Welty transformed a working city bus in Santa Fe, NM into a meditation on consumption (a family of three bought all that, enough to cover a whole bus?!), gluttony (a family of three ate all that, and with all the people starving in the world?!) and time (all those stickers represent all those days, passed us by like this bus) by plastering it with saved stickers.

As a finalist in the coveted James and Audrey Foster Prize at the just opened Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, Welty created the installation Wall, 2007, entirely out of silver twist ties. In order to create the floor to ceiling cascade of sparkling rings, Welty enlisted over 40 people, recruited on Craig’s List, to partake in a series of “twisting bees.”

Plastic bread tags make up the remarkable 208,896 Loaves, 2004, a bowl with a diameter of 5 feet. Up until recently this was a central piece of the solo show “daily bread” at the Barbara Krakow Gallery in Boston.

Another piece installed for the ICA’s Foster Prize, Karaoke Wrong Number,
2001-2004, a video in which the artist lip-synchs to wrong number messages left on her answering machine over several years with hilariously appropriate facial expressions, was acquired by the museum for their permanent collection. It will be unveiled in the upcoming show “Accumulations,” in which the museum will celebrate the next installment of the permanent collection.

Welty is currently working on a massive installation in the new Johnson and Johnson building in Manhattan, inspired by works such as Kitchen Drawer, 2007 and The contents of my pantry, 2004. On an 18’ by 91/2’ wall Welty will assemble a constellation of miniature representations of J&J’s products from all of their subsidiaries all over the world.

Welty’s 208,896 Loaves is one of the works she will re-install for “Ultrasonic International II, Translating Transience” a group show at the Mark Moore Gallery in Santa Monica CA. The show which will run from July 14 through August 25 confronts the inevitability of change.

To read more about Rachel Perry Welty, visit her website. http://www.rachelperrywelty.com.

Title Photo by Annie Kenney

See more about Rachel’s exhibit in LA on Flavorpill here.