Also this issue:

Better is Best
-Toby Zinman
-David Anthony Fox

Step One
Run by students for students, Gallery One eases the transition to the real art world.
-Kristina Weise

Mostar/Sarajevo: Modernist Ruins
-Meredith Broussard

Kelly Link
-Helen Thompson

Jennifer Weiner
-Alex Richmond

Cecilia Bartoli with Le Musiche Nove
-David Shengold

Barbara Cook: Mostly Sondheim
-David Anthony Fox

September 26-October 2, 2002

art

Astrid Bowlby: Leaves of Grass

Astrid Bowlby's Leaves of Grass. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

by Susan Hagen

Astrid Bowlby: Leaves of Grass

Through Nov. 10, Morris Gallery, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Broad and Cherry sts., 215-972-7600

Sometimes it seems as if daily life in contemporary America is made up of so much churning stuff! I can tell you that in my own life, cars, telephones, furniture, books, papers, art, socks, bicycles and soccer balls often seem to rush through my field of vision like juggling props in a fast-forwarding burlesque show. Astrid Bowlby, in her new installation at PAFA, has somehow captured and frozen, or perhaps freeze-dried, this raw material of life into a humorously over-saturated diorama made of thousands of scissor-cut ink drawings on paper. Like her previous series, “The Dark Drawings,” this piece is made of an accumulation of marks that results in a sort of fairy tale topographical landscape.

Bowlby, a Philadelphia artist who originally hails from Maine, was inspired by Walt Whitman’s love of ordinary things and has wryly translated his magnum opus Leaves of Grass into three dimensions. Bowlby says, “Whitman was such a wonderful list-maker. His writing captures the largeness of being alive through these amazing, all-inclusive lists about the things he saw and felt. He gave equal weight to large and small things.” Bowlby has been preparing for her installation for about a year; the thousands of drawings she created, made with bold, black lines on bright, white paper, are laid on the carpeted floor and attached to the off-white walls with double-stick tape. The sizes of the drawings vary enormously, but not necessarily in proportion to the objects they represent. There are small ones, less than an inch across, and bigger ones that are around 3 by 4 feet. There’s very little detail in the individual images, but together they create an intricate universe of stuff. Looking through the stuff carefully, I could identify many objects, including eyeglasses, scissors, needles, paintbrushes, light bulbs, baseball bats, slotted spoons, shoes, nails, ladles, brassieres, peas, “Dr. Seuss” contraptions, squiggles, leaves, lampshades, fire hydrants, flowers, hats, mittens, underpants, pipes, boards, cars, spiraling hinged things, clouds, plungers, socks and airplanes -- all piled up willy-nilly and floating, disconnected, freed from their usual purposefulness.

Through her diligent workmanship creating this installation, Bowlby has discovered a strange kind of happy-go-lucky lightness in the crush and futility of all of these objects. Museum-goers can experience this by walking through the installation on a bare spot in the form of a curving path that leads from one door of the gallery to the other. The drawings create a kind of garden of flat images of man-made and natural objects, with the density of drawings shifting throughout the space. They seem to rest on the floor like the fallen leaves of autumn. The south and west walls have a shared line of the tiniest drawings installed thickly at the horizon (around 4 feet above the floor) and thinning out as they move toward the floor. Other parts of the room have thick vertical accretions of drawings like falling snow or sleet -- or perhaps confetti. There's also an orderly strip of grass leaves above the molding about 12 feet from the ground, around three walls of the gallery. The drawings spill out into the foyer, around the doorjambs on the floor and above the wainscoting, and begin to converse with PAFA architect Frank Furness' marvelous and eccentric ornamental design. Inexplicably, though the size of the gallery seems much smaller because of all of the crowded little things in it, Bowlby's installation gives the viewer a light and airy sense of space, freedom and potential.

With typical enthusiasm and energy (worthy of Whitman himself), Bowlby already has another project under way in "an unannounced public space" in Philadelphia. She is working on decals made from more drawings of stuff, for example a cat, cowboy hat and smokestack, silk screen-printed onto white vinyl. The decals will be installed all around the city as a street art project. Watch for them!