Noble Gas Neon works shine at the Butler Institute In the wake of its economic and political plagues, Youngstown somehow continues to enjoy a degree of cultural health. The Butler Institute of American Art, founded in 1919, has actually prospered under the visionary leadership of Executive Director Louis Zona during the past three decades, renovating older galleries and in 2000 opening the new ultra-modern Beecher Center for Arts and Technology. The Center’s Flad Gallery showcases digital and electronic media, this month exhibiting works by Jeffry Chiplis made out of recycled neon advertisements and decorative strips – “found neon,” as the Cleveland-based artist terms his chosen materials. Neon has been used by a number of mold-breaking modernists, while rustbelt art is often rich in objets trouvés. But taking vintage shards of commercial technology and plugging them into a different end of the culture, playing with a bit of our neglected poetry, is a neat mix of originality and what the periodic table lists as one of the six “noble” gases. Chiplis is a man with an eye for beauty in unlikely places -- he’s known also as a world-class collector of carrot memorabilia, for example. But however you feel about carrots, slinky neon tubing is easy enough to love, with a night time beauty that evokes both the glamour of cities and the glimmering madness of chemistry. Sometimes Chiplis has liberated neon or argon-filled sections of glass tubing from abandoned gas stations or billboards, but he insists that where it comes from doesn’t matter; he plucks it from the rusting city and, after some minor fiddling, plunks it back down, re-contextualized along the byways of his own imagination. At the Flad Gallery his “Egyptian Fantasy” rebuilds the remains of several Camel cigarette advertisements, creating a cartouche-ish tableau: Small blue camels trek in from the right; above them, wavy lines flow and a pyramidal yellow mirage floats near a sun-like coil -- a god ambling past on neon legs. Or there’s “Bonfire,” where flame-like red and yellow shapes rise from a fiery tangle of phosphorous-coated glass, surrounded by real logs arranged as makeshift stools. The tone of Chiplis’s re-contextualizations blinks between canny neo- Dadaist punning and more contemporary, deep-pile abstraction. Several years ago noted art critic and scholar Thomas McEvilley became aware of Chiplis’s sculpture/installation work and penned a center spread for an issue of Art in America. Shows in prestigious New York venues ensued, but the artist, while pleased, remains undistracted by his fame. New works like “A Dull Swim,” so-called because of slight damage to the final “t” in a found-neon phrase, further juxtaposed with a man’s face, a hand, a zero, and a plus sign -- are as crisply ambiguous as ever. Chiplis continues to place image-laden materials at a new angle to the eye, reinventing their corner of space and time. Through May 9, 2010 Jeffry Chiplis / Neon Works in the 21st Century The Butler Institute of American Art 524 Wick Ave. Youngstown, OH |
Bonfire, Jeff Chiplis