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3/5/2006

Assemblage by Susan Tibbles

Riverside Art Museum, Riverside

James Patrick Finnegan and Coleen Sterritt

The Riverside Art Museum is privileged to be able to present the majority of the collection of Susan Tibbles’ L.A. Times Opinion-section assemblages in the Bobbie Powell Gallery. This exhibition is scheduled to travel on to the Laband Art Gallery, Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and then to the Carnegie Art Museum in Oxnard, California.

The art of assemblage has been around for a century or more. In that time, many of its practitioners, from the Futurists and Dadaists before and during World War I to the Beat and Pop-related artists working during the Vietnam conflict, have used assemblage to make political statements. Susan Tibbles is an assemblagist with a difference. She doesn’t make political statements with her constructions of found and acquired objects; she makes statements about politics.

For the last six years, Tibbles has produced a series of assemblages designed to appear - in two-dimensional photographic reproduction - on the Opinion-Editorial pages of the Los Angeles Times. Designed to appear with specific articles, the artworks do not function like political cartoons. They do not express the artist’s opinion about current issues. Rather, they function like illustrations or even illuminations, giving concise visual form to the concepts put forth in the articles they accompany.

Self-taught, Tibbles, an accomplished artist with an active career in southern California, caught the eye of Wes Bausmith, art director for the L.A. Times Opinion section. It was the fall of 2000, and Bausmith wanted Tibbles to formulate an image that would address the presidential race between Al Gore and George Bush. Since then, Tibbles has produced some 133 assemblages for the Times. And, as it happens, all these artworks have been kept together as an integral collection. The body of work, in the private collection of Geoffrey Le Plastrier, documents both the arc of recent political history and the growth of Tibbles as an artful commentator on politics through fine art.

The Riverside Art Museum is proud to present sculpture and works on paper by Los Angeles artist Coleen Sterritt and Bay area artist James Patrick Finnegan.

Coleen Sterritt formulates sculptures out of myriad distinct segments. Incorporating recognizable found objects (something new to her sculpture) with wood objects of all kinds, from construction scrap to pinecones, Sterritt's work can be described as organic abstraction. To various extents Sterritt’s sculptures seem functional, but never quite reveal what they’re supposed to do. Rather, they brim with possibility, with poetic metaphor, and with the ever-present threat of entropic dissolution, a coming-apart of their components.

Sterritt’s works on paper bear a significant formal and spiritual connection to her sculptures, although the paper pieces do not serve as studies for the three-dimensional. Both bristle with suggestions, of the human body, of tools and tables, of machines and furniture, of things as they are and as they appear to us in dreams. Artist-critic Julia Couzens writes that "[Sterritt's] art has come to challenge us to understand her visual language not only on the referential level, but also, like life, on that of the poetic, the contingent, and the ephemeral.“

The multipartite structures of James Patrick Finnegan pretend at function, but ultimately defy it. Steeped in the northern California traditions of well-crafted eccentricity and gently psychedelic surrealism, Finnegan’s sculptures burgeon with a discursive inflection that bends towards poetry at one moment, sight gags the next, folksy homily after that. The gee-wisdom of William T. Wiley, Robert Arneson, and Robert Hudson, among others, clearly gives Finnegan his permission to wax poetic and go for baroque, but urges him finally towards accessibility and human scale. Like those notoriously heterogeneous meta-sculptors, Finnegan incorporates a wide range of things - including his own drawings - into his constructions. His process of formal reasoning is basically referential - indeed, often nearly representational. There is a studied exuberance to Finnegan’s freestanding work, while his work on paper seems at once more expansively gestural and more sober in tone; clearly, the paper pieces do not serve as studies for the three-dimensional, but rather as reflections on their components - or, as mentioned, as components themselves. With each component added, Finnegan ups the ante regarding the potential “usefulness" of his constructions. But in the end, they frustrate utility and reward contemplation, drawing us back to the idea of the thing rather than the thing itself. To paraphrase the Zen koan, Finnegan’s things are not things; nor are they otherwise.

Coleen Sterritt received an MFA from Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles in 1979. She has since received many distinguished awards, including a California Artist Fellowship from the J. Paul Getty Trust Fund for Visual Arts in Sculpture and an Artist Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. Over the past three decades Sterritt’s work has been exhibited nationwide, and is included in many public collections, among them the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento; the Carnation Company, Los Angeles; Capitol Group Companies, Los Angeles, New York, and London; and the Scripps College Collection, Claremont, CA. James Patrick Finnegan earned an MFA from University of Wisconsin at Madison. Over the past three decades Finnegan’s work has been exhibited nationwide and is included in many public collections, among them the Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art, Roswell, New Mexico; Robert and Annette Lichtenstein Collection, Malibu, California and many others.

The Riverside Art Museum, located in downtown Riverside, occupies a beautiful historic building designed and built by Hearst Castle architect Julia Morgan. The Mission of the Riverside Art Museum is to serve the various communities and diverse populations of the Inland Empire by providing visual art of the finest quality.

Reception Sunday, May 7, 2006 1 - 4pm

Riverside Art Museum
3425 Mission Inn Avenue - Riverside
Museum Hours: Monday through Saturday, 10:00 am to 4:00 pm, Thursday until 8 pm
Admission: Dollars 5.00 per visitor, museum members, students, children 12 & under free

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