Page 17 - the NOISE April 2014

Shawn Skabelund’s installation The Price of Entrance exhibited at Grand Canyon Park Headquarters.
BY
SARAH GIANELLI
All of the following artists, from Viola Award winners Shawn Skabelund and Baje Whitetho- rne to longtime Recycled Art Show participant John Rogers, are entirely interesting in their own right, but became more so through the experience of meeting them back to back. Taken together, they are representative of the astonishingly diverse forms creativity, and its intent, can take. Viola Award Winner in the category of Excellence in Visual Arts, Shawn Skabelund, is a highly conceptual artist/ activist whose meticulously wrought, provocative installations explore humanity’s relationship with the natural world. Native American artist, Baje Whitethorne Sr., winner of the Viola Award for Lifetime Contribution to the Arts, doesn’t wax philosophical about the deeper meaning of his dy- namic watercolor and acrylic renditions of Navajo life. It is as if he is saying, without saying, ‘this is what I grew up seeing, and this is simply what I do.’ And fi- nally, Recycled Art Show regular, John Rogers aka Trans-mission Man makes kaleidoscopes, wind chimes and musical sculpture out of car parts and other repurposed materials, with the simple intent to evoke a smile.
CEREBRALLY-CHARGED
Intense and uncompromising, Shawn Sk- abelund is a highly cerebral artist of the most serious kind. He articulates his highly charged feelings about the impact of mankind on the natural world as precisely through words as he does through his artwork.
Mr. Skabelund’s roots and forte are in figure drawing, a skill he believes to be fun- damental to all mediums and whose impor- tance he cannot stress enough. He traces his departure from traditional figure drawing to charged eco-political pieces to his first show after graduate school.
Instead of human figures, Mr. Skabelund showed drawings of deer, a response to the plight of mule deer in Northern and Central Utah as a result of encroaching develop-
ment. The image of the female deer, having evolved into a symbol of Mother Nature, has figured in his work ever since.
Mr. Skabelund’s father was in the For- est Service, which exposed him to the out- doors, but “My dad has more of the Tea Party mentality,” he says. “In a way, I’m very much against big government, but when it comes to protecting National Parks and wilderness areas, and managing forests, I’m all for it. It hasn’t been a pretty picture.”
Mr. Skabelund is not afraid to stare un- blinkingly into the not-so-pretty picture, nor create works that are confrontational and controversial. He was surprised the installa- tion that developed out of his time as an art- ist in residence at Grand Canyon in 2011 was actually exhibited in the Park Headquarters the following summer.
The Price of Entrance was the outcome of many years of research into the history of Uranium mining in and around the park. In
1998, while hiking the West Rim Trail with his family, they came across a chain link fence with signs reading “Caution: Radioactive Area.” Behind the fence stood the remnants of a rusty head frame. Bewildered and ap- palled as to why this was allowed to happen, The Price of Entrance is the creative culmina- tion of what he found out: that uranium mining had been allowed to happen, not because of national security and the cold war as he suspected, but because the fed- eral government and the public had simply allowed it.
Like many of his pieces, The Price of En- trance is site specific, and once dismantled, their components will often be recycled into other artwork. In this case, he created an abstract map on a ponderosa pine platform and placed it over the literal map inlaid in the Park headquarters floor. A routed-out line filled with pine sap traces the Colorado River;
concrete tiles conceal images of potentially polluted watersheds; and antique Grand Canyon sewer pipes stand like smokestacks where uranium mining did and could take place. “These are areas that ask the question,
‘What if we allowed mining exploration to happen?’” He explains, “If we’re not careful as the public — because we own the park, not the government — if we’re not alert and attentive to what’s going on, mining could happen anywhere.”
For Mr. Skabelund, just as disturbing as the mining is the government’s attempt to erase that not-so-pretty piece of the park’s history by removing any trace of it.
“That’s why ten years later I did this instal- lation,” he says. “Now you go into that same spot, and they’re wiping clean that anything existed there. History is disappearing, and many of us feel it is important to leave it there — as a reminder.”
Although Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar put a moratorium uranium mining in 2011, Mr. Skabelund found another ax to grind during his stay at Grand Canyon — he- licoptor overflights — and you can expect an equally visceral installation piece on this heated issue from Mr. Skabelund in the com- ing years.
In 2013, Mr. Skabelund had his first show in Flagstaff, at Coconino Center for the Arts. “Virga: In Search of Water” consisted of draw- ings and installations reflecting Mr. Skabe-
lund’s intimate connection with specific landscapes in Northern Arizona, through his creation of new “landscapes,” many incor- porating materials gathered in nature. The powerful Standing at the Fire’s Edge, consists of densely-packed, charred ponderosa pine, sewer pipes, and a lone aspen rising out of the center; a commentary on the increase in wildfires due to years of fire suppression. In Corvus, a crow specimen is suspended inside
a cone of filaments shining out from a disc of bright yellow pine pollen. Referencing the Greek myth in which an angry Apollo turns the white raven’s feathers black, it implies the necessity of finding a way to coexist harmoniously with our fellow man and the larger world we live in.
Mr. Skabelund is currently at work on three new installations — the designs for one, a work of art in and of itself, is laid out on the drawing table in his studio, and will incorporate a performance by a concert pianist in the center of the installation. The same room contains a variety of his most personal —and sexual — work, like the ab- stract diptych Fertility Hole, made out of his wife’s hair and yellow pine pollen.
Downstairs is a recent piece Mr. Skabe- lund considers his most beautiful and simple work of art. Mercy Seat, which he donated to the Flagstaff Arts & Leadership Academy’s
“Chairs for Change” auction (and ended up purchasing himself ), is a scorched wooden chair. He replaced one of the legs with the bones of a deer leg, and affixed it with a 1962 deer hunting tag from his native Idaho. “Well, I thought, a chair is a person,” he says. “It’s got four legs, just like a deer has four legs. I’ve been using the female deer to symbolize mother earth, manifest destiny and destruc- tion ... and now with global warming and burning — what I’m exploring today is the same as what I was exploring 20 years ago.”
Years after Mr. Skabelund began using art to express critical views about mankind’s impact on the natural world, he learned his surname breaks down into two Danish words: skabe, meaning a small grove of trees or enclosure; and lund, meaning the creator, etymological roots that prove ever more fit- ting as he continues to surge forward on his creative trajectory.
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thenoise.us • the NOISE arts & news • APRIL 2014 • 17