Beuys in the hood

Everyone’s an artist at Filament

By Chris Thompson

“The Hill Project” runs until Saturday, Nov. 11 at Filament Gallery, 195 Congress Street, Thursday-Saturday, 10-6 and by appointment (775-0418)

MAP IT: defining the Hill at Filament

Art historians still squabble about who first announced that “Everyone is an artist.” They seem to agree that it was first said in the mid-1960s and general consensus gives the credit to German artist Joseph Beuys. “Everyone is an artist”: he didn’t mean that each of us should aspire to be a painter or a poet, but that each of us is fundamentally creative, and consequently the way we live our life is as much a work of art as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

This inclusionary, empowering vibe is hard at work at the Filament Gallery, which made its home near the crest of Munjoy Hill back in June. On this last 1st Friday Artwalk, with the band Clown School Dropouts’ drumbeats and honking horns creating a playful ambience, Filament held the opening for its “Hill Project” — more a neighborhood Happening than an art exhibition. On October 19, artists and Filament proprietors Jill Dalton and Ernest Paterno issued an open invitation to come contribute to the large mural map of the East End that is gradually coming to life on the gallery’s back wall. A table straight out of kindergarten art class, with markers, paints, brushes, paper, and glue, sits at the foot of the mural, a massive hand-drawn gull’s-eye view of the East End. A sprawling sheet of paper covers the floor in front of it. It is covered with spillage from paint meant for the mural, a game of tic-tac-toe in crayon, brushstrokes testing color concoctions, and the word “Important” scrawled by some elementary school graffiti artist.

The map includes the East End only. The unnecessary West End fades into an Antarctic emptiness at the bottom edge of the map, where adults’ and kids’ purple handprints mingle with blossoming flowers drawn in felt-tip by a budding young Beuys. In contrast, the depiction of the Munjoy hood abounds in rich detail. One of the artists in the accompanying exhibition — Susan Winn, whose ornamented masks made from found objects and glass beads come to life on the gallery walls — pasted up a drawing of her apartment building. A jogger took a minute to come in and immortalize her workout with a picture of herself mid-stride. Familiar landmarks like Fort Gorges, and the Filament Gallery, of course, appear too. During the opening dozens of visitors (the author included) took a moment to add some personal monument. Everyone’s an artist after all.

Many of the mapmakers are also among the eight “real” artists (“real” in that their works have labels and pricetags) whose work is on display on the gallery’s other walls. All of them live in the neighborhood. One, Frank Turek, wrote a text called “Philosophic Ruminations on Living on the Hill” to accompany his meticulous “collage reliefs.” His piece “Vanishing Point” hangs by the entrance. Its frame is papered with maps of the Mid-Atlantic states, echoing the communal map at the other end of the gallery. Inside this box a number of items (a torn-edged image of a desert highway with a plastic dragonfly perched on it; a photo of four sled dogs with four metal keys glued onto it) are layered atop a black-and-white photo of 19th-century society folks sitting politely in a drawing room. Turek’s boxed juxtapositions, much like Joseph Cornell’s well-known curiosity-cabinet constructions, create a microcosm that is not immediately accessible. He compares this to a first visit to the Hill: “The Hill, like my work, is a neighborhood where you’ll have to spend some time to settle down in it in order to accomplish any sense of understanding it.”

This show encourages taking a minute to get to know your neighbors through their representations of themselves and their backyard. In a time when gallery shows feel fairly interchangeable, when you could ship the contents of one white cube to a more or less identical space anywhere else on earth and stage a more or less identical show, “The Hill Project” is an inspiring example of the polar opposite of this homogeneity. You don’t have to be from Munjoy Hill to appreciate the beauty of a project that couldn’t (and wouldn’t want to) happen anywhere else.

This feeling of participation in a community endeavor links works in the show that might otherwise seem unconnected, for instance, those of Masako Kubota and Anna Tchernenko. Kubota’s colorful recreations of everyday items frozen in mid-use — like “KY Jelly,” a painted plaster sculpture of a tube of lubricant being rolled to get to the last drop — musingly explore the way the private world of sexuality and desire opens into and is infiltrated by the public world of consumer goods. Tchernenko’s prints, at first glance, seem brooding and closed off from the outside. But in fact both artists exemplify the process that characterizes this show: that of turning everyday scenes and objects into poetic fragments adding up to more than a sum of their parts. Tchernenko’s lithograph “Hope” depicts a wintry, bomb-gutted city block. The image’s sole color comes from a single, golden budding branch reaching across its foreground. This simple visual language reinforces the work’s even simpler message: the sun also rises. This soft-spoken reminder is the heartbeat of “The Hill Project.” Maybe it’s no coincidence that the East End sees the sunrise first.

Chris Thompson can be reached at xxtopher@hotmail.com.