Page 17 - the NOISE March 2014

A Remington and a Bell Atlantic from cover artist, Ellen Jo Roberts’ Analog Series.
BY
SARAH GIANELLI
THE QUEEN OF KITSCH:
FINDING INSPIRATION IN YESTERYEAR
If a home is a window into an individual’s soul, the soul of Clarkdale artist, writer, and photographer Ellen Jo Roberts is a cheerful museum of kitsch. Stepping inside, a tower- ing fig tree wound with big-bulbed colored Christmas tree lights casts a warm, dim glow; and a record player spins an old timey Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass number in the next room. Glancing around, one naturally takes on the demeanor of being in a home- spun gallery or lovingly amassed curios shop, stepping up close to the walls to scrutinize paint-by-number landscapes squeezed in next to cartoonish paintings of beloved pets, and grainy photographs of Route 66 land- marks; and peering into shelves crowded with families of troll dolls; plastic, enormous- eared mice; souvenir plates, vintage cameras and model cars, to pick out the gems.
“I’ve always been super nostalgic and sentimental,” says Ms. Roberts, reaching for a large plastic goat on a shelf in her kitchen that tickles her memory. She opens Gobbles the Goat’s central cavity to reveal a belly filled with miniature molded plastic “gar- bage”: a loosely rendered string of sausages, a tin can, wrench, and a leafy frond of lettuce.
The toy came out in 1978 and eight-year- old Ellen Jo wanted it badly. She shows me a framed ad for the toy on which she had scribbled “this is for Ellen!” — an ungranted Christmas plea to her mother.
Not long ago, Ms. Roberts’ earnest child- hood prayers were finally answered when she found a Gobbles at Goodwill. Not want- ing him to be lonely, she found a second one on eBay, still in the box, which she tore open immediately. A large painting she did of the goats hangs below her kitchen bric-a-bac mantel.
As writers, we always want to find deeper
we’re
archaeologists —
Indiana
ULRIKE ARNOLD:
PAINTING EARTH WITH EARTH
Sometimes an artist’s process is as fasci- nating as their finished work. Such is the case with German artist Ulrike Arnold, whose new exhibit EARTH is on display at the Mu- seum of Northern Arizona through May 4. For decades Ms. Arnold has been traveling the world creating large abstracts with paint made from crushed earth and meteorites gathered at places that inspire her, which has long included Flagstaff and the Colorado Plateau. Ms. Arnold hikes out to remote loca- tions, sometimes scaling canyons to obtain a particular soil sample she wants, and sets up a studio onsite where she communes with the land, distills its essence and transfers it onto her canvas.
Working outdoors, Ms. Arnold crushes coarse earth with her hands or grinds them to fine sand in a mortar, mixes them with an acrylic binder and spreads them onto canvas. Her painting tools include her hands, feet, brushes, pitchforks and rocks to scoop and apply her paint, allowing the elements of wind and rain to join her in her creation.
“To say that she’s one with nature is an un- derstatement,” says MNA Marketing Director Diane Rechel, as she leads me through the large, sandy abstracts stapled unceremoni- ously to the walls, mirroring the understated power of Mother Nature. In the middle of the room, one of Ms. Arnold’s works is laid out flat on a platform, surrounded by cloth bags filled with gray, red and ochre earth in varying degrees of coarseness, with exam- ples of the raw implements she might use as a“brush.”
Her pieces call out to the viewer to run a hand over their sandpapery surface. Up close, you get lost in the individual grains
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meaning, but in Ms. Roberts’ case the depth may be found in simplicity. She delights in her collectables: they inspire her art-making, and connect her to an era that, romantic notion or not, we tend to perceive as more innocent, and easier to navigate. If Ms. Rob- erts’ is making a statement, she expresses it through her choice to stay true to “outdated modes of technology,” and a general dubi- ousness about the increasing intangibility of the modern world.
In her living room, four towers of DVDs, VHS, and CDs lean precariously around a television. A working rotary dial phone rests nearby — she prefers a landline, a flip phone cuts it otherwise — and a selection of vin- tage cameras from her very own “Clarkdale Camera Museum” pays tribute to her pre- ferred photographic device.
For Ms. Roberts, it is not enough to merely surround herself with and use the things themselves. She takes it one step further by making them — not exclusively but almost obsessively — the subject of her paintings and photographs. Analog Series consists of four small paintings: a record player, a cam- era with expandable bellows, a typewriter, and a rotary phone. The colors pop bright and playful, the bold strokes simulating a crayon wielded by a skilled hand.
“I’m amazed these big heavy things you could hurl at someone and kill them with — are now all in one single, light, handheld device!” Ms. Roberts exclaims. “Why do I need the stuff that’s here? Because there’s so
much today that’s not real!”
According to The Book of Birthdays, Ms.
Roberts was born on the Day of the Observer — a life’s purpose that resonates with her.
“I imagine myself a documentarian of my times,” says the artist, “but also maybe a cu- rator as well. Many of the artifacts collected comes from road trips and adventures, so
it’s like
Jones! — bringing back curios from faraway
lands. A majority of our information is virtual nowadays, and I have a basic mistrust for it. Computer coding changes, files become ob- solete or go out of fashion — and in the end we may be left with no records of anything. It may just all vaporize! The tangible, hand- written, painted, printed, sculpted — these things will not vaporize.
“So much of what we live, feel, experience can fade on us if we don’t document it some- how. In writing it down in a journal or mak- ing it into a story we are preserving it at its freshest. I think that’s also why I’m such a shutterbug. It keeps memories and adven- tures fresh forever.
“I didn’t always take a camera along on my expeditions, and some of those early ones are dreamlike and vague because of it. I guess what it amounts to that in the end, when I am at the end of my life, I want some- thing to show for it all! Words and images and art. It’s all for the same purpose.”
Ms. Roberts’ penchant for the past doesn’t translate into deprecating modernity or those who embrace it fully, nor does it diminish her own enjoyment of the present. Rather, sur- rounding herself with her cherished memen- tos, seems to enhance her experience of it.
“There are a lot of joyful things in here,” she says. “Sometimes I’m just incapacitated by the joy in the world and I’m attracted to colorful, lyrical things that reflect that in the world. It’s not necessarily a typical kind of beauty, but it’s beautiful to me.”
Locally, Ms. Roberts’ artwork can be found at Junipine Resort in Oak Creek Canyon, The Red Rooster Café and Mimi’s Art & Antiques in Old Town Cottonwood, and the newly opened Clarkdale Caboose Gift Shop in downtown Clarkdale. A large selection of her artwork can be found at ellenjo.com
thenoise.us • the NOISE arts & news • MARCH 2014 • 17