Assemblage by Rachel Hellner, Dorothy Field, Dale Roberts and Martin Batchelor - review by Debora Alanna

Assemblage
30 November – 24 December 2013
Martin Batchelor Gallery
712 Cormorant Street
Victoria BC

Boccioni and Tatlin did it. Elsa von Freytag-Lorinhoven and Meret Oppenheim did it.  Braque, Picasso and Duchamp did it. Louise Nevelson and Hans Bellmer did it. Breton and Dubuffet and Schwitters did it. Cornell and Wallace Berman. Rauschenberg, Johns, Chamberlain, Raoul Houssman, Betya Saar, Rosalie Gascoigne, Robert H. Hudson, Arman, Kienholz + Kienholz, Lebel, Wolf Vestel and Wassman – all did it. All and many more renowned and less know late century artists made assemblages. Artists continued to make assemblages through the last century and continue today to make work called assemblages. So did Rachel Hellner, Dorothy Field, Dale Roberts and Martin Batchelor – the foursome that exhibited in Assemblage last month at the Martin Batchelor Gallery in Victoria BC.

The reason for the ample though incomplete list above is to show the tradition from which this show is based, the resolve and ingenuity needed to bring found objects and/or material together to make usually what are three dimensional works, is a long standing art practice. Assemblage work is still viable and provocative. If a contemporary artist emulates Tatlin’s counter-reliefs or contemplates Dubuffet’s assemblages d'empreintes (tr. from French: fingerprint assemblages) or examines and employs Rauschenberg combines sensibility, or follows purists within historical realms of neo or pseudo Futurist, Cubist, Surrealist, Dada, Pop and any other variances of one or many past and present period dictums – it doesn’t matter. Each artist that ever combined, boxed, married one material with another, often objet trouvé, ready mades, junk, parts, discards, stuff makes work unique to their oeuvre, describes their unique thought process with what’s handy. Artists did. Artists do.

What’s different from working with the conceptual discipline of using only one or many found objects is assemblages use (in theory passed down from theorists) more than one object in juxtaposition, and usually are stuck together without glue. Collages (from the French, colle, to glue), also constructed of found things, are usually flat. As are montages, and photomontages, découpage. Also, assemblages can be bricolage (tr. from French: tinkering) where works are not necessarily, strictly found. Contextually there may be pastiche (appropriations), allusion, medleys of thoughts, mishmashes of concept and devices. Ad infinitum. This show was titled Assemblage, because that is how these artists see their work in this particular exhibition. Good enough.

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Rachel Hellner

Goldy says, “I have drawn Mommy Bear in reverse. I forgot when I was drawing her that if it is to be printed directly from my drawing, it requires an original mirror-image master. But I am going to leave her that way because it’s well to remind everyone at the outset that we can only get from here to there by a series of errors – errors forwardly to the right, then a correcting forwardly error to the left, each time reducing error but never eliminating it. This is what generates waves; this is what generates the experience life.”
  - Tetrascroll, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, A Cosmic Fairy Tale, by Buckminster Fuller, St. Martin’s Press, 1975, pg. 4

As scientist Sheldon H. Geller explains, “scientific research cannot prove anything…it disproves error.” By contrast, the perceptive artist learns how to repeat and magnify his errors in order to create his own distinctive style for sharing new truth.
  - ABC of Prophecy: Understanding the Environment, Barrington Nevitt, 1985, pg. 77

Rachel Hellner assembles corollaries of inference, plateaus of ethological purport as refined absorbed investigation. Quasi Latin titles speak authoritatively of lapsed ideologies, dogmas that illustrate what matters, how medical sanctioning can be cogent and miss importunate outcomes of its influence. Hand drawn obsolete or invasive medical tools interact with allusions to bodies in her subtle as whispers fine distinctions of thought throughout wax and graphite grounds. Ploys of pathological excise gambit conversationally. Mounds of fingerprints or fingerprint like shapes are configured in arrays of collections, not looking in as in Joseph Cornell’s rows of holes invite, but poking out, a reversal of or mirror image of what is biometric calculation. Some hover as pressing, shadowy ovoid shapes, memories of contact overlooking or distanced from the manoeuvring between sensation and sensitivity. Animals, animalistic behaviours stir, insist on rapport in Hellner’s disquietingly precise achromatic drawing, contestations framed within potent desirous whiteness. Within Forcipe et pilum and Cattus et pilum, the white ground belies purity, boasts the wide expanse of the unknown with tips that confidently define variant points of consideration of the dominant precept. Extrusive grey cat fur tuffs tuff here and there in jaunty defiance of human presumption.

Like Goldy drawing contrarily, Hellner draws deviation, inexact sizes, describing acuity of sensation and erroneous medical intervention. Enlarging or reducing encroachment, systems anticipate interaction in her scrupulously rendering of truths through medical oversight, misconstrued dismissal of unnerving relationships to animal delineation. Hellner scenarios are experiential montages that entail human anatomy interplayed with medical mystification throughout investigational human landscapes of compelling imposition. She draws on the mistake of ignoring our discomfort at what is awry. The results of this dismissal can be dastard foxy machinations and spiteful catty conduct. Hellner emphasises the wiliness of humanity with impish candour.

Retractor cannula cum pilum – Rachel Hellner. Actual artwork 10x10"/Including frame 16x16” (photo courtesy Rachel Hellner)

A cannula retractor or tube, usually containing a trocar, a sharp-pointed surgical instrument at one end, is inserted into an intimate view of a frenzily skinned body surface, the eye of an outburst the stacked finger marks with fuzzy comic peak of fur, ambiguous evidence that the event belongs to someone. It is unclear if the intention is to drain or administer a substance, an extant therapeutic administration. However, one can speculate that the draining of spirit, the inserting of unwelcome convention has resulted in red dots of blood like dribble on this and other works. Hellner’s cut out and protruding rendering is instrumental in describing the thin nature of empirical practices. With Retractor cannula cum pilum and several other works Hellner seems to adopt another Joseph Cornell type juxtaposition of imagery seen in his Untitled (Schooner), 1931, For example, in the lower left corner, an isolated and solitary reference to a body part appears as a disengaged body component. The top shoots wavy, confabulating, Hellner draws body system segments shaped to be animalistic with tentacle feathering within the composition, assembling a beckon, a wield of formidable questioning when she exposes the essential physiological segments.

DETAIL: Retractor cannula cum pilum – Rachel Hellner. Actual artwork 10x10"/Including frame 16x16” (photo by Debora Alanna)

Like Instrumenta et nervosi (instruments and nerves), a pile of finger prints designate territorial assertion, self asserting autonomy, a means of keeping distant from hostile instrumentation and encroaching bodily combat.

Instrumenta et nervosi - Rachel Hellner. Actual artwork 10x10"/Including frame 16x16” (photo courtesy Rachel Hellner)

If suppositions[1] in reference to a plot summary or stage production in the Ancient Greek context are consequential, compositions test the accuracy and observations of how we interact, how antecedents of ideas work, how propositions can be counterfactual. Goldy’s errors, human tests of time sequencing creates a wave of substantiation to concur with the surreality that science can never prove. Hellner stages scenes of rousing apprehension by probing sincerity.

Cellulis et tenebrae - Rachel Hellner. Actual artwork 10x10"/Including frame 16x16” (photo courtesy Rachel Hellner)

Cellulis et tenebrae (Latin for pertaining to the cells, and 'shadows' or 'darkness', specifically the Christian church service requiring candle light be extinguished during readings and hymns to commemorate the death of Jesus before Easter, the Resurrection) is a discreet metaphor made into a universal experience of loss. Oceans of cellular movement transverse bodily fluid beholden to the extant instruments of healing that float ineffectually disconnected with existence. Tools languish, spent .Incised rectangular blue bits, the aberrant litmus tests float willy nilly, a discarded veracity.

DETAIL: Cellulis et tenebrae - Rachel Hellner. Actual artwork 10x10"/Including frame 16x16” (photo by Debora Alanna)

Dark foreground indicates a gloomy bewildered outcome to medical offensiveness. Waves of cellular incision cut through to venial blue ground, the whiteness of structural strength, incorruptibility cuts deep through to the other side of hope.

Homo austus cum instrumenta - Rachel Hellner Actual artwork 10x10"/Including frame 16x16” (photo courtesy Rachel Hellner)

Toughly translated from the Latin as caustic person, with instrument, Homo austus cum instrumenta shows an anthropomorphic fox, its head ejecting below the heavenly constellations of membrane, erasure forming an explosive event that extends beyond the confines of the picture plane, the sharp edge of inviolability detonated in a constellation of wonder. A buoyant apparatus lies suspended in time. Critical, the triple variant of modified fingertip pile hold blocks any allusive animosity from advancing, self confidence asserted against escaping wild instincts.

DETAIL: Cattus et pilum – Rachel Hellner. Actual artwork 10x10"/Including frame 16x16” (photo by Debora Alanna)

Cattus et pilum or cat and skin, shows stacks of finger prints becoming patterns in sequence, genetic referencing marked with colour or actual finger print prints a little roughly cut to indicate unique or distinctive unambiguous evidence of a specific entity, substance, person, animal. Holding pins become cell nuclei, the repetitions a pulse or response time. Jaunty fur caps taunt, confirm the importance of the askew, as the cat with a fur obliterated eye sits in askance of our ability to converge and merge the understanding of the origins existence, qualities of perfection and how we can accept segregation, containment. They become foci, and windows to distinguish themselves as singular doubt formations that are charming but niggling. Skin tips instruct, command the picture plane, and are apertures to see the proverbial waves of subsistence. Timothy Leary’s eight circuit models of consciousness or circuits of information (eight "brains ") operating within human nervous system, possibly, each with equal import. [2] The two rows of four configurations can also be seen in Forcipe et pilum (forceps and skin). In that work, the underlying excise forceps is latent manipulation, dormant grasping pincer like implement considered by the brains, contemplating options (skinny) for physical survival.

There are two ways to suppress or attenuate the distinction between nature and culture. The first is to liken animal behavior to human behavior (Lorenz tried it, with disquieting political implications). But what we are saying is that the idea of assemblages can replace the idea of behavior, and thus with respect to the idea of assemblage, the nature-culture distinction no longer matters. In a certain way, behaviour is still a contour. But an assemblage is first and foremost what keeps very heterogeneous elements together: e.g. a sound, a gesture, a position, etc., both natural and artificial elements. The problem is one of “consistency” or “coherence,” and it prior to the problem of behavior. How do things take on consistency? How do they cohere? Even among very different things, an intensive continuity can be found. We have borrowed the word “plateau” from Bateson precisely to designate these zones of intensive continuity. (Gilles Deleuze Two Regimes of Madness, pgs. 176 – 179. MIT Press.)

Hellners deftly drawn floating cat entreats, dubious of our reliability to position and employ our ideals and especially our capability to embrace nature’s cadences and imperfections and bond in spite of each other’s flaws. She counters irony of choices with incongruous defaced animal correlations that define human interactions and reciprocal relationships, refining assemblage. Hellner considers the intensive contours of continuity of existence, the transactions embodied in her aptly constructed plateaus.

Umbraculum cum instrumenta – Rachel Hellner. Actual artwork 10x10"/Including frame 16x16” (photo courtesy Rachel Hellner)

Umbraculum cum instrumenta, is a title describing umbraculum from the Italian ombrellino, "little umbrella", historically a piece of the papal regalia and insignia, the pavilion and symbol of the Roman Catholic Church. [3] With an instrument. Hellner’s work is dominated by an inverted and perforated cone projecting out from the surface, resembling an enlarged cone biopsy where an inverted cone of tissue is excised from the uterine cervix. An undulating crest of tissue with musculature surface incorporated extends a tubular device, as in a fallopian configuration cut off from its source.

DETAIL: Umbraculum cum instrumenta – Rachel Hellner. Actual artwork 10x10"/Including frame 16x16” (photo by Debora Alanna)

Again measuring instrument hovers, dark ovoids lurk, fingering the humanity. The reference to the reversed papal symbol indicates a contentious reproductive tissue issue. The sculptural phenomenon is rigorously extensive in its complexity, observing explicative exactitude in the cutting and assemblage. Neither Goldy nor Mama Bear would be able to circumvent or reverse this incalculable life experience one little bit and would indeed be waves of intercession. No ifs ands or buts, hypothetically. Medical presuppositions are impudent conjecture. Hellner shows the truth of the matter.

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Dorothy Field
 
In the unresolved, our unfolding continues in our imaginations and therefore in our souls, grappling up from bare-bone facts.
~ Mystic Trudeau: The Fire and the Rose, B.W. Powe, Thomas Allen Publishers, Toronto, Ontario, 2007. pg. 250

Most of Dorothy Field’s assemblages entail found wood boxes of a uniform size. She conjoins tools, metal, stones, skulls and single bones to each work’s box and within her Sardines #1 and Sardines #2 assemblages, many bones. In Treasure Box #11 –Ruler Pulley, Field pairs a pulley to the seemingly suspended box compartmentalizing a rusty ruler. With her sardine can constructs, Field diverges from the otherwise consistent containment process.

Sardines #1, Sardines #2 – Dorothy Field. (photo by Debora Alanna)

Her utilization of sardine cans filled with aviary, predominantly spinal bones, is at first whimsical, then terrifying. Holocaust commentary erupts. Fledgling or mature centra bone fragments are indistinguishable and jumbled into open tins. Sardines are sustenance, tinned victuals eaten to survive. The most disturbing relationship to sardines is the reference to human packing of those that perished in gas chambers during the Holocaust. Crowding people into the death chambers have been referred to as being packed like sardines[4] ‘Sardinenpackung’ in German. Each of Field’s sardine cans is a slightly different size and colour opened with a slightly different twist, similar but different. Those that were released from camps and those that were killed become symbolized by bird bones, could be thought of as represented by each can, one can for each assemblage of people, perhaps. The work becomes a memorial to those that dreamed of escape, flight, and could not flee from imprisonment, spirits being released - in Psalm xi, the soul is compared to a bird: “Flee as a bird to your mountain.” The work can also reference those that are imprisoned by memory. Together, the assemblages seem like eyes pried opened to the bones of death exposing tousled mortality, the continuance of retained memory.

Treasure Box #3 – Rock Scissors Glass – 5 x 10”. Dorothy Field. (photo by Debora Alanna)

Treasure Box #5–Brush – Hake – 5 x 10”. Dorothy Field. (photo by Debora Alanna)

Treasure Box #7 – Scissors – 5 x 10”. Dorothy Field. (photo by Debora Alanna)

Many of Field’s Treasure Box series together are reckonings, assaying the merit of disuse from dereliction, decline, abandonment in the works Treasure Box #1–Rock Paper Scissors, Treasure Box #3 – Rock Scissors Glass, Treasure Box #4 – House Paint Brush, Treasure Box #5–Brush – Hake, Treasure Box #7 – Scissors. Objects place in singular, vertical compositions become symbols of spent humanity.

Treasure Box #4 – House Paint Brush – 5 x 10”. Dorothy Field. (photo by Debora Alanna)

Treasure Box #6 – Pliers and Bone – 5 x 10”. Dorothy Field. (photo by Debora Alanna)

Treasure Box #9 – Bird Skull – 5 x 10”. Dorothy Field. (photo by Debora Alanna)

Treasure Box #4 – House Paint Brush , Treasure Box #6 – Pliers and Bone and Treasure Box #9 – Bird Skull share a gold or golden background. Preciousness is associated with gold. Patinas of uneven and faded prestige Treasure Box #4 – House Paint Brush, a longing for sophistication, past wealth, even gestures that recollect extravagance, dismay. Field employs the most decorative but tattered gold paper treatment in the work titled Treasure Box #6 – Pliers and Bone. Once glorious wallpaper is highly contrasted with rusty pliers and a bone fragment attached beside the tool, ostensibly portraying a forgotten tool of torture with the staging of bone, humanity lost in the golden metallic, a pattern of a past life. Treasure Box #9 – Bird Skull employs luminous golden treatment, scored. A bird skull top centre dives towards the rock below, a memorial stone (seen in other works too) the immutable finality is imperfect as the small hard grey mass is lumpy, offers no comfort. Field juxtaposes death and downfall.

Treasure Box #1–Rock Paper Scissors – 5 x 10”. Dorothy Field. (photo by Debora Alanna)

Treasure Box #8 – Rust and Bone – 5 x 10”. Dorothy Field. (photo by Debora Alanna)

These works are contrasts to the whitewashed backgrounds of Treasure Box #1–Rock Paper Scissors, Treasure Box #8 – Rust and Bone, denoting an effort to enhance appeal in the course of privation. Broken dreams, promises, fragments of a life lived and damaged through chance appear in the first of these two. The second, a bent bar is overlaid with a triangulation of bone, furcula or a wish bone. A single stone becomes a figuration, a touchstone for the promise of endurance where the circuitous, worn metal path intersects the wish. Something had to die for the wish to become fact.

Treasure Box #2 – Curly Kelp Korea – 5 x 10”. Dorothy Field. (photo by Debora Alanna)

Treasure Box # 10 – Rusty Angles – 5 x 10”. Dorothy Field. (photo by Debora Alanna)

Treasure Box #11–Ruler Pulley – 5 x 10”. Dorothy Field. (photo by Debora Alanna

Treasure Box #2 – Curly Kelp Korea utilizes a unique Korean newspaper background with dried kelp curling centrally. The dried kelp, primarily harvested as food in East Asia is also has industrial applications, used for fertilizer, for sodium and potassium salts, thickening agents and colloid (as in paint suspension) stabilizers in commercial products. Field’s choice of a kelp ribbon dance movement or a wave of a prayer flag is still life. Harvested kelp becomes a liberating agent. The kelp gracefully choreographs freedom on the discoloured news, a memorable sheet remarking on Field’s multiple travels to Asia. Field was profoundly nourished there, and her adventures liberating. All other Treasure Box works utilize bare wood simplicity of the box, acceptance of the found as purposeful and useful.


Twisted metal strips evoking Rauschenberg’s metal choices (Treasure Box #8, too) and a stone low and disconnected from the main, another memorial. Treasure Box # 10 – Rusty Angles is displayed with hand painted background, sweeps and whips of subdued colour. A wobbly helix, a rusted shambling life force continues to move, reigns above the nugget, a perfect truth. Field’s painted scenery shows the way to be gentle and dreamy.

Treasure Box #11–Ruler Pulley shows the same humble box as in the other treasure boxes hoisted in a suspiciously incongruous configuration. Inside, a rusted metal ruler is fitted to the upper edge. The attachment suggests an immeasurable figuration, the weight of which must be held fast, and suspended, winched lest it be allowed to fall – a corroded bias assigned to an ineffectual pulley to delay, hinder its inevitable collapse. Field’s Treasure Box works are caches replete with contest and cost, treasures of acknowledgement. She encloses brave testaments tackled, confidently structured with inspired combinations segregated - suspended belief. We find deep sincerity in her 'Assemblage' contribution. There is no absence or deficiency. Her work is commanding. Field assembles valuable wisdom.

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Dale Roberts
 
The Greek word Symbolon means the halves of a broken piece of pottery. One part of the physical object rests in the physical world, the other part in the invisible. Symbolic moments are those events when we are conscious that life has taken on powerful metaphoric vibrations. Life feels heightened. We sense that we are being struck open, in our hearts, or drawn upwards, away from the cracked world. Every meeting of the vertical and horizontal planes is a layering of realms, in the ritual crux. These are the experiences that seem to move us beyond matter, into a spiritual realm.
~ Mystic Trudeau: The Fire and the Rose, B.W. Powe, Thomas Allen Publishers, Toronto, Ontario, 2007. pg. 162-3

This was the trick, [Allen Ginsberg] now figured, to distill visionary experience into a poem and convey it, through a kind of supernatural mental transmission, to the reader. Poetry might set off similar explosions in people’s heads. Take away the “sawdust of reason” and the poem becomes a machine whereby the juxtaposition of real and unreal images, the telescoping of time, combines with the suggestion of magical emotions to release the fleeting “archangel of soul.”
~ A Blue Hand: The Beats in India, Deborah Baker, the Penguin Group, New York, N.Y., 2008, pg. 36

Dale Roberts gleans private and shared chronicles, distilling histories. He extracts the phenomenon of appearance elegiacally. Each work conjures the essence of remarkable, irrecoverable pasts with wilful abandon. Encapsulating the venerably intrepid, each sculpture, assemblage is a story. Robert’s pieces are fraught with poetic incarnations, personification as sculpture. He activates materials with deference to its origins. Private significance surges along with socially preserved notions, some sullied. Gathered, melded and handmade treatments champion, assert gallantly, solicitous. Roberts’ contributions to Assemblage are eagerly exuberant, patient explorations that reflect his facility for knowledge of humanity with serendipitous finds availing the juncture between life and assembled circumstances, soulfully. Materialization is embodied as assembled relevance.

Heaven Cent – 36 x 56 x 10” Dale Roberts. (photo courtesy Dale Roberts)

Heaven transverses cultures as a long standing evocation to an ideal local, somewhere where everyone might ultimately benefit or a place abundance is available, or a target of hopeful, timeless feats. Who knows when people started divining heaven? Homer wrote about heaven in The Odyssey, for example. “Someone may tell you something, or (and people often hear things in this way) some heaven-sent message may direct you.” Cent, a humble coinage, a fractional monetary unit is currency the world over, a minimum exchange or tender. Ancient antecedents - Celts, Greeks, Romans, many in all parts of Asia, India – cultures all over the world. Pervasive, too was the use of coins in the mouth or on the eyes to pay for transport to the land of the dead, paying the ferryman, referred to as Charon's obol by the Greeks and in Latin liturgy – Charon, being the ferryman, obol, the money. [5] In Canada, the minimal coinage was called a penny. Pennies are no longer in circulation in Canada.
Roberts changes the idiom, heaven sent which was believed in past generations as god-given fortune and employs his version of the song title, Pennies from Heaven, the Frank Sinatra song where

Every time it rains, it rains pennies from heaven.
Don't you know each cloud contains pennies from heaven?
You'll find your fortune's fallin' all over the town
Be sure that your umbrella is upside down
 
Sinatra’s lyrics describe life’s adversity as fortunate, encourages collection of these resources, the rain or challenges can be valuable and enriching.

Robert’s Heaven Cent is a morality tale, the retired pennies of life, innocence, humble notions or inspiration lost in the proverbial sea with no chance of rescue. A remnant of sail canvas shrouds the work, with debris of nautical journeys stationed around the window full of pennies recounting past ideas of sense woefully. The hardened pennies float forever in the beyond surrounded by references to a lifesaving devices, the float framing the view with net and pulley, rope – all means of recovery lie about the work in a haphazard embrace. Heaven Cent deliberates drowned humility. Roberts entombs outmoded pennies in resin as consideration of engulfed simplicity. A dislocated lock from the ultimate treasure chest is rusty, and ineffectual. Pennies were once the exemplary means through simpler times. Now no amount of pennies will ever pay the cost and are just pretty pennies. Uncomplicated troubles, straightforward solutions symbolized by the inaccessible pennies gathered in shinny copper array become a view to lost means of change, unavailable delight, the demise of a common denominator. No umbrella will ever collect life’s scarcity as treasure that can be accumulated and dispersed. No penny will ever be a heavenly sent resolution, a song of hope ever again.

(Feather suitcase) – 22 x 16 x 18" Dale Roberts. (photo courtesy Dale Roberts)

(Feather suitcase) –22 x 16 x 18" Dale Roberts. (photo by Debora Alanna)

(Feather suitcase) –22 x 16 x 18" Dale Roberts. (photo courtesy Dale Roberts)

(Feather suitcase), the title parenthesised as the work is a parenthesis, a collective entity. A departure, an interval, an isolated commentary about recycled substance is a recapitulated personal story. Roberts covers a suitcase with down from a pillow his grandmother made, a pillow he lied on for 20 years and relates his experience of her walls once packed with feathers, insulation. The contents’ once fine, soft, fluffy feathers that formed first plumage are now hardened by adhesive. Whiten exterior and greyed interior glued feathers constitute the outside of the cardboard case and the interior. Upholding pillars, with a picture framed window to the interior on the right side, on the left side, a boat bumper he crocheted a white cover for, protrudes within and can be seen on the outer wall. The bumper fits between the pillars if the case is closed. Roberts has encased the buffer cushioning, support columns that nicely fit together. We can see into the/his attachments, as we can see the shock absorber through cleverly crafted swathe and lozenge shape, details of life’s mercies revealed. Roberts’ work is candid and endearing. He shows we can adorn with and carry fitting feathery recollections.

Night and Day –26 x 36 x 14" Dale Roberts. (photo courtesy Dale Roberts)

Night and Day –26 x 36 x 14" Dale Roberts. (photo courtesy Debora Alanna)

Night and Day –26 x 36 x 14" Dale Roberts. (photo by Debora Alanna)

“..night and day are very necessary for my kind of thinking, the light and the dark: very important.” ~ Louise Nevelson. From interview of Louise Nevelson conducted 1964 June-1966? May 11, by Dorothy Seckler, for the Archives of American Art.
Louise Nevelson, master of collage enshrined, Roberts felted bust inhabits a light and dark reference to her creations. His stunning depiction of Nevelson’s head and shoulders is portrayed regally with celestial cap and ermine like collar. The intromission is poised. An upright entailment nestles among deeply dark wood fragments with panache of gold heralding Nevelson’s sculpture assemblage oeuvre. White sides, black interior containment on a slim wood strut stand, rhythmically syncopated dances, brings an arrangement of legs to the portrait.

Nevelson thought of black as all encompassing, aristocratic. She said it was a colour that gave you totality, quietness, excitement ‘I have seen things that were transformed into black that took on just greatness. I don’t want to use a lesser word. Now if it does that for things I’ve handled, that means that the essence of it is just what you call – alchemy.” ~ Louise Nevelson s 'quote prefacing Arthur C. Danto’s essay, p. 39 in The Sculpture of Louise Nevelson: Constructing a Legend by Louise Nevelson, Jewish Museum (New York, N.Y.). On page 45, Nevelson describes white as a transformative process result through heroic action, a ‘spiritual promotion.’ She considered gold contrary to natural time cycles, however she used gold to enhance, enrich forms (sic, p. 46).
Roberts’ Night and Day shows opposing parts of time but more importantly, experiential light and dark emotional responses. He chose to make the interior black, with the luminous portrait, instrumentalist and guide, and the outside of the work white. The gold in the background, flaunts - ostensibly a halo to the felted Louise along with bits of shimmer on some of the black wooden bits and pieces enhance and enrich the visual experience. The outside feels like Roberts has engaged in a transformative process and objectifies his thoughtful acceptance of Nevelson’s influence allowing a transformation become the mantle to the mystery, a balancing agency. Robert’s white surfaces are tenuously painted showing the conduit of transformation is integral to the assembled, abstraction of surface forms precisely cut explication. Forms are prevailing and enlighten giving the dark internal enigma intellectual clarity.

The edge between the dark interior and light surround is slim. Roberts describes how the inscrutable night exists, is dependent upon and within the construct, possible because of the light of day. He shows the depth of the past enables the presence of the present. Broken, cut and fragmented found or reclaimed bits function as metaphor for bringing together disparate parts towards a unified whole and timelessness of night from the continuity and precision of day.

Hommage to Schwitters – 18 x 18 x 5" Dale Roberts. (photo courtesy Dale Roberts)

Roberts’ Hommage to Schwitters is a Merz-like construction, including collage, design, built as a wall hung sculpture. This fragmented “merz” assemblage celebrates the potential of leftover materials while addressing the boundary between art and life, Schwitters’ and Roberts’.
October 1985, The sorrows of Kurt Schwitters, an essay by Hilton Kramer in the New Criterion quotes Schwitters’ assembled works as being a “new art forms out of the remains of a former culture”. Kramer claims the assemblages to be “his most distinctive and original work. Yet despite this new sense of personal freedom which the revolution gave Schwitters, its political program appears to have meant little or nothing to him, and it was his adamant refusal to attach his art to the politics of revolution that caused the ideologues of the German Dada movement to condemn him as hopelessly bourgeois.” Although Richard Huelsenbeck, and Schwitters were once colleagues that reciprocated efforts towards each other’s endeavours. Schwitters explains:

“Huelsendada
So, Huelsenbeck has put our feud in print -- HA HA
So he sneers at my bourgeois home -- my child
who cries, who has to be changed and fed
So he laughs at my solid wife -- that she's no Anna Bloom
So families are not dada -- HA -- neither is the future then
So an artist has nothing to do with kids,
with homes, with Christmas trees
And this is commitment -- HA -- this is communist art
Well, art is not communist -- not bourgeois either
It's no club and has no party line
Not wild nights make an artist -- not drugs or manifestos
It's art -- HA HA -- that's no secret
The one who makes art -- he's the artist
His one duty-to shape the stuff that comes to hand
So he can't serve two masters -- [6]
 
Not art in the service of revolution, not revolution at all -- if it fetters art: There were many fractions and factions of Dada, the early 20^th century movement against reason and logic, prizing nonsense, irrationality and intuition. The origin of the name Dada is unclear; some believe that it is a nonsensical word [7] but the predominant raison d’être was art itself.

Roberts Hommage is adhered to a wall, a plaque of commemoration on the most middle class of materials, plywood, with frame and furniture fragments that might appear in any bourgeois dwelling. The circular work is almost face-like, a Roberts’-like countenance. Protrusions above seem like eyes askew, a Schwitters’ contortion, a vision out of place, off centre. A chevron from a frame suggests a bearded chin, a chin defiant, bravery and confidence. Slats crisscross, confining and obfuscating collage, and a paint brush with wood bristles, nodding to Schwitters’ and perhaps Roberts’ painting endeavours confined and restrictive. Roberts’ choice of assembling the remnants of a bourgeois casement to a sphere, a flattened realm is portentous. His use of substantial and warmly worn material carves out a life in conflict. Hommage to Schwitters is rugged and resolute, stalwart adornment emulating Schwitters moral strength and physical prowess This work is a symbol of Roberts’ fidelity to Schwitters’ choices, his respect for his work practice while honouring an indestructible, substantial spirit that adheres to vision through imposing peer pressure.

Caution Prayin' Ahead –32 x 14 x 27" Dale Roberts. (photo courtesy Dale Roberts)

Caution Prayin' Ahead –32 x 14 x 27" Dale Roberts. (photo by Debora Alanna)

Bejesus! A case of conflict, Caution Prayin' Ahead holds a Jesus figure surrounded by torn and bunched rosettes of bible pages. Thick, sinisterly sculpted serpentine arms sly and tempting originate from behind Jesus on the left of the suitcase, with a cuckoo clock, an alarm clock (time is running out?), a blood orange segment, hymnal, poetry elements, a pinecone halved, the cross section of a Papal symbol of the everlasting (also found along with the penny window in Heaven Cent), (‘And Jacob called the name of the place Peniel (pinecone): “For I have seen God face to face, and my life is preserved./And as he passed over Peniel the sun rose upon him.’-Genesis 32:30-3. (Literal Biblical translation of the word “Peniel” means “Face of God”), a purple (a Papal colour) strobe light occupy the face. On the right, a fire alarm, the word, Passion diagonal and prominent, birth announcements, a burned photo, a Zen story, letter, Come to Jesus Now pamphlet, and the like. Celluclay oozes out and holds the outside of the containment, the same material as the serpent. On the right top/side, a footprint relating to the poem, by Rachel Aviv [8]or the opening paragraph of Charles Haddon Spurgeon’s 1880 sermon, "The Education of the Sons of God” [9] or Mary B. C. Slade's 1871 hymn "Footsteps of Jesus". [10] Leona Lewis wrote "Footprints in the Sand" for the television program, Footprints in the sand, and more people claim authorship. Whatever the source, the point of the sandy foot print on Caution Prayin' Ahead refers to a dream. The dreamer walks on a beach with God, and two sets of footprints are imprinted. Footprints of the dreamer reveal points in their life. At the most difficult times of the person’s life, two sets merge to one set. Assuming he was abandoned during the times of trial, the dreamer questions God, who explains that at those times of pain, he carried the sufferer. One of those footsteps is implanted on a door on the right side, leading inside the case. A Virgin and child look over the doorway. A record scores the scene. On the other case face, a sign, Caution praying ahead is a broken street notice, serves as a warning and indicator of a struggle within the entire work. Robert’s title utilizes the more vernacular Prayn’, a colloquial speech, a conversational declaration. The title and the statement, the caveat qualifies the assertion by using the apostrophe to abstract the concept and enlist the audience to imagine that the artist through the work is addressing someone or something. The prayin’ is for clarity, wrestling through liturgy, through religious influence and popular belief. Robert exerts his flair for assemblage to compose a cautionary tale. If unease and distress prevail, and the alarm is pulled, will faith combust?

DETAIL: Caution Prayin' Ahead –32 x 14 x 27" Dale Roberts. (photo by Debora Alanna)

DETAIL: Caution Prayin' Ahead –32 x 14 x 27". Dale Roberts (photo by Debora Alanna)

(Hommage to Stella), another title in parentheses, this time Roberts tells us a secret, his admiration of this historical figure that resided in the Duck Block on Broad Street in downtown Victoria where his studio is located. This work is also a jam packed with revere for Victoria’s notorious madam.

(Hommage to Stella) –26 x 28 x 14" Dale Roberts. (photo courtesy Dale Roberts)

Hannah Estelle Carroll called Stella by her mother, a woman that did business and resided in the artists’ building was, according to Linda J. Eversol, in her 2005 biography of Ms Carroll, an unrepentant madam in the turn of the last century. In addition to engaging in the prostitution trade and providing a haven for others to ply their wares in several brothel locations, notably her Broad Street bawdy house, and lesser known locations in Chatham and Herald Street houses, gambling and liquor sales on her premises supplemented her income from real estate and rental property, and a boarding house, and horse racing. Her premises’ were reputed to be exquisitely decorated, impeccably clean (she liked to clean!). Her girls were carefully selected, beautifully attired. Clients, the rich and powerful were offered elegant food and fashionable entertainment. She was also recognized for her philanthropic activity, giving food to the poor and orphans, supplementing the coffers of charities.

(Hommage to Stella) –26 x 28 x 14" Dale Roberts. (photo courtesy Dale Roberts)

A valise full of invented memorabilia, and some objects found in his studio that could have been hers spill out exemplifying her fame and fortune. A cat head from Cairo, lamb’s wool, jewelled candle snuffer. Negative and positive images of mostly men, an allusion to clients titillate, although the photos are only suggestions. Tiles with 324 signify her Broad Street, Duck Block address. On the left side of the case a RCA 78, fluted with a heat gun chosen for the songs melted as Stella melted hearts. Side 2 would have played Stars of the Summer Night, Home Sweet Home, Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes,Home Sweet Home, Good Night Sweet Ladies, Seeing Nelly Home.

(Hommage to Stella) –26 x 28 x 14" Dale Roberts. (photo by Debora Alanna)

Roberts generates a glamorous appeal for the life replete with tempestuous politics and savvy business acumen. Roberts testament to a life lived with panache and fortitude is displayed with a top pineapple, a multiple use symbol – a pinecone on top of the Papal staff, for example. Here the imposing finial is a symbol of virility and caprice. Roberts’ whimsical opulence features Chinese shelving that extends beyond the case structure. Dice and bric-a-brack that could have been Stella’s valued accoutrements are proudly displayed. On the ceiling, a jewel clasped bag becomes a chandelier. The left face of the assemblage holds a record moulded to rivulets, as a hair style might have been crimpled. Sherry, jewellery, fool’s gold are imbedded into the tablature and at the forefront, a photo of Stella Carroll. 
Roberts encases an exceptional life with multiple winks and a plethora of nods. Vividly imposing, he carefully enshrines Carroll’s fortuitous but contrary existence established with the support of the desirously bamboozled throughout the work's bountiful veneration, charging the sculpture with teasing charismatic awe that peaks intrigue. Roberts’ work is impenitently glorious.

Dale Roberts – Installation (photo courtesy Dale Roberts)

Dale Roberts – Installation (photo courtesy Dale Roberts)

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Martin Batchelor
 
Anyone who plunges into infinity, in both time and space, farther and farther without stopping, needs fixed points, mileposts as he flashes by, for otherwise his movement is indistinguishable from standing still. There must be stars past which he shoots, beacons by which he can measure the path he has travelled. He must mark off his universe into units of a certain length, into compartments which repeat one another in endless succession. Each time he crosses the border from one compartment to another, his clock ticks.

~ Oneindigheidsbenaderingen (Approaches to Infinity), by M. C. Escher, in De wereld van het zwart en wit, ed. J Hulsker, Wereld-Bibliotheek, Amsterdam, 1959, pgs. 41 – 49

Although still life has been depicted since the Greeks, at least, artists have, if not boxing their household paraphernalia and life events, examining them in a jumble Anne Vallayer-Coster style, as seen in her The Attributes of Painting, Sculpture, Architecture c. 1769. Assembling life, encasing the inanimate to still life has been around a while, as an idea. Assembling life’s artifacts in box like settings can be seen in precursors to assemblage work in paintings by Juan Sánchez Cotán, Still Life with Game Fowl, Vegetables and Fruits, 1602, Cornelis Norbertus Gysbrechts (ca. 1660-1683), Trompe l'oeil (c. 1680), for example. As artists’ practices, in retrospect galloped through the last century, and variations emerged to address the immediate social constructs, philosophical and emotional sensitibilites lived within. Original ways to make work that tangles life and object as a still life assemblage through the multiple isms has transcended time constraints. Artists continue to be compelled to respond to life in an assembled still. 

Martin Batchelor’s work too is a series of still lifes, artifacts of living compiled to distinguish, contrast, discern and characterize quintessential male experiences of the 20th mid century. With Raoul Haussman-like collaged imagery pasted behind or amongst personal memorabilia or collected expended objects, Batchelor has cut from magazines and newspapers to set the viewpoint of each work. Batchelor’s work is contemplative, distinguished by an understated urbane suave of that part of the period. Batchelor is very astute at summing up, garnering time and longing, reflecting on measures of existence during decades of significance and the implications of place. And we are mesmerized, never wanting to leave or let go.

Paramour –10 x 12 x 3” Martin Batchelor  (photo courtesy Martin Batchelor)

Star light, star bright,
The first star I see tonight;
I wish I may, I wish I might,
Have the wish I wish tonight [11]
 

Martin Batchelor’s Paramour is still life situated in a sedate blue metal box (blue for boys), a found object establishes the masculine assemblage. He showcases a fancy man of biz, spiffy, and another picture of him decked out seems an ace of some kind, speaking in the vernacular of the mid 20^th century. cut out printed advertising images of a confident smoking male in the 40s or 50s. He looks like someone from Mad Men. An image of a male in white formal attire, signifying marriage or classy and expensive pursuits is complemented by buttons, a handsome period pen, a lighter. Above the assemblage is a foil star with a virgin as cameo. A Pall Mall cigarette box (so 20^th century) with its distinctive Art Nouveau font is distinguished with a knight’s helmet and regal lions on a shield, a coat of arms below reading Per aspera ad Astra,(tr. Latin: Through [the] thorns to the stars), and a banner below says In hoc signo vinces (tr. Latin: By this sign shall you conquer). The Pall Mall slogan, "Wherever Particular People Congregate", appears below the shield. All texts are apt slogans for the era. Batchchelor has represents the sentiment of “Through [the] thorns to the stars with the star placed prominently above the work.” The religious icon a prayer, and perhaps a reference to “By this sign shall you conquer”, as the paramour, for his dalliance needs guidance from Faith. Or, it may be a reference to Cole Porter 30s song, recorded by Frank Sinatra on the 1956 album, Songs for Swingin' Lovers! Lyrics includes the line, ‘Now heaven knows, anything goes’ In that song, too, ‘When most guys today that women prize today/Are just silly gigolos’. Batchelor’s Paramour, with his personal memorabilia, prizes and pride might be the debonair sophisticate of the song, loving his life, his loves, posed and immortalized by Batchelor where particular people congregate – in a dramatic picturesque tableau vivant. If wishes were granted the Paramour’s life would never change and remain as he appears timeless in this work. Batchelor shrewdly devised the epitome of an enduring historical moment with precision.

Good Cop Bad Cop –12 x 16 x 5” Martin Batchelor (photo courtesy Martin Batchelor)

Within a found biscuit tin, with Batchelor’s treatment looks like a call box, Good Cop Bad Cop is loosely based on crime in the mid century televised understanding of the policeman’s experience. Paraphernalia of the era is featured that we have come to know as CSI equipment. A calliper, bullet, a gage, medicinal indigestion remedy and water pistol, for example shapes how one might play at good cop/bad cop. Batchelor has intensified the assemblage with police stances while on duty as collage in the background. They are for the most part, happy in their work. The police seen speaking on the phone is a bit ruffled, shaking his fist. Batchelor condensed summation of idealized crime fighting is nostalgic and we too wish that the times were as simple as the work illustrates. Batchelor has gathered the memory for our satiation. We cannot have too little to look at, as times have changed. We might as well be looking at a 15^th century still life, for the proximity to this innocence suggests.

Separate Lives –10 x 12 x 3” Martin Batchelor (photo courtesy Martin Batchelor)

Separate Lives lives in a cigar box that many in the mid century era utilized as a collection device. Cut-outs of men and women in their underwear are pasted to the back and front as private views assembled to mark how people saw each other in private, or at least in magazines, their convictions about the other sex based on popular imagery seen in print media, movies and TV, often. A mucilage bottle, a beetle bug button, a navy figurine, a message, chocolate, a lamp, a flower, a pinup card, a spy glass – all appurtenances contrast and distance the romanticized privacy that one might imagine another is experiencing. Again, Batchelor preserves the attitudes and outlooks, the opinions of what was expected of how people ought to think of themselves and each other. He abridges the complex while understating how underneath the dreamy and impractical, there was a quixotic but prosaic banality that inspired. Still inspires.

Dr No (No Doctor) –12 x 16 x 5” Martin Batchelor (photo courtesy Martin Batchelor)

A double o, 007 - Bond, James Bond, licence to kill memory plant, strange intrigue, lust - recounting Dr No versus severe period asceticism in the minds of film viewing public. Batchelor considers the medical in perceived lives during the mid century and absence of or limit to medical availability, understood through his title for this assemblage, Dr No (No Doctor.) – death to the fictitious and ambivalent evil doers. We could also deduce that there is a resistance to the medical treatment received, and refusal to participate in that professions intervention, being limited by understanding and technology because of his choice of containment, a child’s lunch box. Smooth faced people show brains like swim caps, in unsophisticated illustrations. Other body systems are exemplified and pasted within the collage formed inside the plaid metal lunch kit. Although a convenient holding place for this assemblage, what is memorable about the school lunch container in relation to the work is that Batchelor was a child during this period, and formative experiences are ascertained and presented, along with a measuring device, a measurement of how experiences impact and how we remember are calculated here.

A spoon hangs for the bottles of medicinal evocation. An ambulance driver figurine is dwarfed but signifies the toying of the medical practices of the time, and how we toy with what knowledge we participate in as patients. A cursive metal Skagit feature might originate on a vehicle made or sold near the Skagit valley, or reference the coast Salish tribe where the name originates. Certainly, the sign is top heavy, but gives the work a gauge of strength in its weightiness. Rust, the old fashioned containment, the paint peeling on objects allows us to develop a personal relationship with the mid century is substantiated through the bundles of hand written notes attached to the assemblage. Old things, shapes, how they fit into life suddenly is a relation to someone once living, and we can relate better than ever to what happened to someone one day, because this is a visceral connection to the past. Batchelor has enabled the connection. He includes the anonymous person writing those indecipherable thoughts in our deliberation. We see how we are attached to this past because Batchelor has conveniently corresponded to the objects of that day.

Colour red, red for Red Cross, emergency, blood, red for a cue ball (Bond and the medicine for what ails is always on cue), buttons, a red stamp. Batchelor paints with objects as a painter might paint with colour. He has chosen collage images to coincide with the colour scheme. Some of the things may seem arbitrary, however, like Gysbrechts et al, Batchelor has accumulated and responds to the immediacy of the everyday, and allows us his singular compositions, his insinuating colour treatments, his compositional rigour to appreciate how time impacts the present through the past. Batchelor assembles wistful illation.

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[1] Hilborn, Ray; Mangel, Marc (1997). The ecological detective: confronting models with data. Princeton University Press. p. 24. ISBN 978-0-691-03497-3. Retrieved 22 August 2011.
[2] Leary, Timothy. Info-Psychology, New Falcon Publications, 1989, ISBN 1-56184-105-6.
[3] Galbreath, Donald Lindsay (1972). Papal Heraldry. Heraldry Today. ISBN 0-900455-22-5.
[4] http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/secret-nazi-tapes-shocking-germany-1336922
[5] Ian Morris, Death-ritual and Social Structure in Classical Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 106 online.
[6] The Merzbook: Kurt Schwitters Poems, translated by Colin Morton at the Contemporary American Poetry Archive.
[7] Budd, Dona, The Language of Art Knowledge, Pomegranate Communications, Inc.
[8] Aviv, Rachel. "Enter Sandman: Who wrote footprints?". Poetry Foundation.
[9] Spurgeon, Charles Haddon (10 June 1880). The Education of the Sons of God (PDF). Metropolitan Tabernacle, Newington.
[10] I sing for I cannot be silent: the Feminization of American Hymnody, 1870-1920, June Hadden Hobbs, p. 123
[11] ‘The superstition of hoping for wishes granted when seeing a shooting or falling star may date back to the ancient world.’ I. Opie and M. Tatem, A Dictionary of Superstitions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 175-6.