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You are here: Home / Architecture & Sense of Place / The Art of Infrastructure

The Art of Infrastructure

February 11, 2017 by Iskra 2 Comments

“For poets of the ordinary nothing has to be something else to be more than what it is.”— Anon

For People who Like Orange, industrial art print by Iskra
For People Who Like Orange, Mixed media archival pigment print on paper or canvas, size variable up to 50″

Contain. Hold. Spill. Accept. Refuse. ref-yoos. Dumpsters put a lid on what we can’t bear to keep or smell or look at any longer, and give us the illusion that our national sin of consumer indulgence is not squandered, but instead made noble through the absolution of waste management. All that discarded packaging is repackaged and sits neatly on the street in a box. Occasionally the lid lifts at a provocative angle and stays there, held by chains and wheels in suspension and possibility. Crows come. Lunch is foraged, toasters reclaimed, and on certain days of the week someone finds a discarded mattress and takes a nap. Dumpsters have their own oratory. Although more punk rock than symphony, every city gets a daily concert of metal on metal and smashing glass, the rumble of trucks, and the quieter transcripts of disenfranchisement and identity that take place at night, each one overwriting the other with a soft hiss and the percussive shake of the little ball in its can of paint.

It has been in vogue for many years to work with “recycled” materials as a way of making a statement about the environment and putting the artist’s powers of transformation on display. Also, working with discarded refuse has a lovely economy to it — it’s free.

Much as I love that idea I look at mangled cardboard and I do not see fashion or furniture or assemblage, I see what’s in front of me, which would be garbage. For the sake of art you can take things out of the dumpster or you can just take the dumpster itself.

Simple Green Recycle Print by iskra
Simple Green, mixed media archival pigment print on paper or canvas, size variable up to 50″

I have been making art about infrastructure and industry for many years, but it has only recently caught on in public discourse. As you may have noticed if you follow the state of the union unfolding on Twitter between midnight and 5 AM each day, infrastructure may be the only actual bipartisan mandate that everyone can agree on. Who doesn’t love a bridge that doesn’t fall down? Who doesn’t need water mains? Who doesn’t rely on the removal of garbage to make it possible to consume more and throw it away again? Yes, infrastructure has arrived. In conjunction with this national moment I proposed a show to SAM Gallery titled Industrial Strength. For the next six months I will be working towards a body of work that will open this coming September with my fellow SAM artists Kate Protage and Kellie Talbot. Three women, industrial strength art, steel-toed boots. Save the whole month, this will be amazing.

Although there will be diverse subjects in the upcoming show, for this week waste management has seized my imagination and it won’t let go.

 

Sphinx of Industry (Giza) print by Iskra
Sphinx of Industry (Giza), mixed media archival pigment print, size variable

 

Container # 110025 Iskra Fine Art Print
Container No. 110025, mixed media archival pigment print, size variable up to 50″

Iskra Fine Art in Print and On TV (!)

In other news I would like to announce my collaboration with Sarah Hurt at Seattle Art Source. After honing her curatorial eye with monthly exhibits at Plank and Grain in the International District, Sarah has begun a business to connect artists with patrons and designers throughout the city. My work was featured with that of several other artists in her recent interview on King 5. I loved Sarah’s take on art as souvenir. Sure you can visit Seattle and come away with a Space Needle, but why not AshGrove Cement? One trip across the West Seattle Bridge and you will fall in love with that landmark of industry (not to mention the majesty of the Duwamish River.)

I am honored to be included in Magnify Seattle, brainchild of Seattle artist/entrepreneur Meggan Joy. This book features the work of 17 Seattle artists, including Anna Siems, Daniel Carrillo, Mya Kerner and David Hytone. I hope you will support fine art publishing in Seattle, and the entrepreneurial audacity it takes to publish a book, and go on over here to take a look.

If you missed it, there is still time to visit Museo on Whidbey Island for the winter show, which ends March 5th. Here are a couple of shots of the opening night with two of my shell paintings:

Iskra Shows Museo Gallery 2017


Lastly, that pesky question of what is an artist to do in a nation on fire? Should we all give up and run for office? Should we switch parties just to be sure we are on the “winning” side? My answer is indirect. Go local. Pay attention. Keep everything in mind, but remember that emotion and personal connection are the food of life. The personal is political and that matters.

I walk daily with my camera, and I keep observing what is going on right here in this particular place. The number of construction cranes multiplies unchecked, and I hardly know how to navigate when I entire blocks of houses disappear. In late summer I took a walk through a lot where I used to get my lawn mower repaired. I loved the oily smell of that place, and the grumpiness of the couple who had been sharpening blades for 40 years. What’s planned, as per the new urbanism, is a high rent block-wide apartment complex, with no need for a lawnmower because there will be no lawn. With the roar of traffic as backdrop I prowled through the deserted parlor of what had been a functioning hive of small industry only a few months before. The writers had come, and the poets, and the air was saturated with the scent of toluene, acetone and whiskey.

 

Anothr Place Where Something Used to Be, archival pigment print
Another Place Where Something Used to Be, archival pigment print, size variable

Is resistance to change purely nostalgia? I think some things are worth holding onto. Some things are better than what will come next. I write my letters. Sometimes it only takes one sentence to save a street.

Filed Under: Architecture & Sense of Place, Iskra Shows, Upcoming and Past, Prints Tagged With: art of infrastructure, dumpster art, Magnify Seattle, museo gallery, recycled art, Seattle Art Source, urban decay

Comments

  1. Tamara Stephas says

    February 12, 2017 at 8:10 am

    You had me at orange. As always, thoughtful, perceptive, incisive, and poetic. Thank you, Iskra, the work is haunting and the ideas will linger to be mulled over. I know your SAM Gallery show will be terrific!

    Reply
  2. Susanne Clark says

    February 13, 2017 at 5:20 am

    Great post!

    Reply

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Subtractive painting study and ground experiment: Subtractive painting study and ground experiment: I added baking soda to my gesso. Pretty wild texture here, not sure yet how stable it is. You can see the test of the edges in the second piece— the rugged edge only works if I get a pristine background and unfortunately the tape I used to mask it did not work consistently. Hello tape, my old friend and nemesis. You work differently on every surface. These little barn structures give me great comfort as the bigger structures of our government and nation seem to be crumbling.
Today’s landscape to quiet the mind. Out in the Today’s landscape to quiet the mind. Out in the fields somewhere, on the road to Edison. Acrylic on prepared ground, sketchbook.
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I am thinking this morning about the phrase Americ I am thinking this morning about the phrase American Heartland. Learning to paint a barn means studying the neutrals. Our political discourse has pitted the barn people against the city people and there are no neutrals, just shouting. But if you walk out into the horizon lands, all you hear is the wind and a kestrel. Walk in boots, hard-pressed against your toes, walk on stubble barefoot and get acupuncture for a lifetime. Study the intervals: how the clouds can be in the upper one third neatly or one sixth, precarious, the future disappearing with the sun as it falls making the barn your whole world if you’re three years old and looking up; one big triangle with a square in the center, and so many mysteries inside the square. 

There is also the question of what kind of light seeps between the verticals and is the light coming in the evening or at midday when you can finally begin to make out all the other tiny squares within the big square, which would be called hay. Reach for the rope and swing out over the canyon, that great big canyon from bale to bale.

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A hybrid study, mixed process. Reading the New Yor A hybrid study, mixed process. Reading the New Yorker this morning, about the global population crash. This will upend urbanism, for sure, though it will very good for veterinarians and dog groomers:
“Only two communities appear to be maintaining very high fertility: ultra-Orthodox Jews and some Anabaptist sects. The economist Robin Hanson’s back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that twenty-third-century America will be dominated by three hundred million Amish people. The likeliest version of the Great Replacement will see a countryside dotted everywhere with handsome barns.”
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