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Image courtesy of G-CADD
Show image for "X."
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Courtesy of the artist and G-CADD
Marie Bannerot McInerney, “Alluvial Drawing.”
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Courtesy of the artist and G-CADD
Noelle Allen, “Saturn’s Shepherd (Green)”
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Courtesy of the artist and G-CADD
Jose Garza, "X"
It's hard to believe that Granite City Art and Design District's resident artist, Jennifer Baker, is already curating her third show. (Or that it's G-CADD's fourth show, proper.) On a very cold day in late January, I drove over the river to meet up with her at INSURANCE, the first gallery space to be finished as part of G-CADD's grand vision for this stretch of State Street. As artist Jackson Bullock arrived to uninstall his striking work for the December show, Jack n Jenny, Baker and I walked to a nearby coffee shop to sit and talk about the suite of shows that are opening on February 6, and what's in store for G-CADD for the next several months.
(If this all sounds like a non sequitur, you can catch up by reading about G-CADD's launch last July, or about its September show, Everyone carries their own idea of north within them).
So, big news first: there's a new indoor venue opening this weekend, PLAQUE (1831 State Street) right across the street from INSURANCE (1822 State Street). And within PLAQUE is mold.
“It’s mold in all senses,” Baker laughs. Anyone who's rehabbed an old building knows that mold is just one of the things you confront when you bring a building back to life, so there was that. But there was also mold, plural: “Downstairs at PLAQUE, in the basement, there were also molds to make ceramic figurines," she says. "There are thousands of them...it’s amazing. When I saw it, I thought, we have got to create a residency, so that artists can use these. There are birds, and little decorative statues. They are white slabs, with an indentation that you pour a ceramic slip into, though the artists wouldn't have to use ceramics. The premise of the residency is that an artist is there for two months, and they can use those molds for whatever they want—we just ask that they do some sort of project that engages the community in some way." The first mold resident is Amy Reidel, who created a floor painting out of sand and glitter for north. “I asked her if we could use the glitter form her floor paintings to make molds," Baker says.
Christening the front room upstairs is curator Liz Wolfson. Her exhibit, PULP 1.0, the first in a series of shows that "pay homage to the power of paper." PULP features three St. Louis artists, Ashley Hohman, Jeremy Kannapell, and Pearl Olsen, who are working in "a variety of mediums, including photo-collage, sumi ink illustrations, site-specific installation, and video." As noted on the exhibit's Facebook event page, the word "pulp," (just like "mold") is used in a multi-faced way here, not just referencing paper, but "a primordial and unprocessed state of existence, raw and slightly unhinged; 'pulp' as that which has been thrown out, broken down, ground up and reconstituted, cultural and psychic refuse collected from humanity's scrap heap and reshaped into mutant forms."
“Without even talking about it, we ended up curating shows with very similar themes,” Baker says. “My show is called X. It’s very much about time, but in a very broad sense—from primordial time, to the time after we cease to exist. So it’s a dark show. Perfect for February."
X features work from Chicago artist Noelle Allen, Marie Bannerot McInerney (expat STL, now based in Kansas City), as well as St. Louis' Ron Leax and Jose Garza, whose piece will be exhibited on the lot at LAUNCH PAD, right next to INSURANCE. Not only is his sculpture also named "X," his interpretation is the most literally "to the letter": it's an upside-down ladder, painted black and affixed to a mirrored pallet to create a criss-cross shape. The other artists are working with X more conceptually, playing with the ideas of intersections, place-holders, "bodily entropy, sedimentary transport, lunar orbit, and architectural ruin as markers of time," using materials such as concrete, magnesium salts, fiber, and "alchemical mixtures of ceramic and resin," in the case of Allen. Baker says that is one of the things she loves about Allen's planetesque scupltures—the materials are so mixed, you can't quite put your finger on what they're made of. McInerney is primarily a fiber artist (she was the go-to special effects dye magician for Opera Theatre of St. Louis when she still lived in town), but her works for X are multi-process sculptural pieces. "She uses things like newspaper and plastic wrap, and re-invents them to make handmade plasters and concrete," Baker says. "So she is making these really beautiful sculptures out what is basically garbage."
Baker and McInerney—who are longtime collaborators—also worked together on a site-specific installation, Epithelia, for the back room at PLAQUE. It features "unusual, skin-like textiles from such materials as handmade paper, plastic, and milk," projected onto surrounding surfaces. There is a musical element, too: local metal band FISTER will perform in the space, and then the artists will sample that performance to use as the soundtrack for their next collaboration.
Before we finished our coffee and made the cold (but brief!) walk back to State Street (where we admired Brett Williams' permanent commissioned sculpture at LAUNCH PAD), we also talked about what Baker has planned for the rest of her residency, including a 'zine show in August, which will gather together all of the publications made by artists who have shown at G-CADD over the past year. There's also something really exciting happening in the spring. But we'll get to that when it happens. In the meantime, there will be plenty to see and hear and experience this Saturday.
G-CADD EXHIBITION 4 opens Saturday, February 6 at 7 p.m. "If ever again to be something," a durational performance by Rafael E. Vera, will take place in the gallery from 7:30-9:30 during the opening reception; FISTER performs at PLAQUE at 10 p.m. The exhibit runs through March 12. For all the details, go to the Facebook event page or gcadd.org.
