Supernatural history

The Saco Museum’s inspired intro-perspective

By Chris Thompson

“Inspired by Saco: Artists Reflect on the Collection of the Saco Museum” opens Thursday May 17 at 6:30pm; composer Denis Nye presents “Work for Instrument and Distortion: Four Movements” on Thursday August 23; 371 Main St., Saco, 283-0958.

KANT AND MY TRUCK, 2001. by Chris Thompson.

“Kant and my truck”: it seems like a failed attempt to translate the punchline of a German joke. In fact it refers to the relics of Aaron T Stephan’s attempt to use a wrench made entirely out of pages of Kant’s Critique of Judgment to fix his Ford truck. Needless to say, the formidable treatise on aesthetic experience was no match for Stephan’s ornery engine. The movable lip of this crescent wrench snapped off without so much as budging the greasy bolt. So much for critical theory.

Stephan is one of eleven artists who have come together to create works in response to the Saco Museum and its eclectic collection. “Kant and my truck” is his response to one 19th-century artifact called the “Biblical Museum.” This is an assortment of tiny boxes containing elements mentioned in the Bible (like frankincense and myrrh) along with a list citing the chapter and verse where they can be found. The dialogue Stephan sets up addresses the fact that modern experience is framed by the possibility of our turning that experience into text. We compare our lives to movies we have seen, books we have read, stories we have heard; our relationship to our past and our present is figuratively and literally mediated by these texts. This attentive textual dialogue — between practices that have long since drifted into a forgotten fog of dusty time-stained boxes and practices that are contemporary, technically and theoretically savvy — characterizes the work of each of the participants in “Inspired by Saco.”

Rachel Katz found an old sextant amidst the collection, and was immediately captivated by the experience of being confronted by a tool for navigation that she had no idea how to use. She made seventeen small lightboxes in response to this, in which she charts relationships between lines of longitude and latitude and the paths of contellations, experimental maps for locating herself between earth and heavens.

Similarly, combining photos, specimens from the museum’s collection, and examples of the range of uses to which we put birds in our everyday speech — “for the birds,” “birds of a feather” — Rose Marasco’s work ruminates upon how we locate ourselves by way of these creatures that embody the connection between land and sky. When she was invited to participate in the show, she says, “I went straight for the birds.” Her photographic work with birds began to take shape when she found herself intrigued by a quick shot she’d taken of a fake owl in an air shaft. She began to dig into the ornithologist’s world; reading about birds, working with illustrations of them, printing silhouettes of them, watching them outside her home, and continuing to snap photos of them. As she worked, “the dots started connecting for me.”

Other participants, like performance artist Susan Bickford and photographer Gary Green, have used the lives of individuals associated with the museum’s past to connect the dots that orient their engagement with local histories. Green began with an interest in a small circular painting by 19th-century artist Gibeon Bradbury. As he learned more about his life and work, he started to visit Pleasant Point, now a nature reserve, where Bradbury had made numerous sketches. “I tried to imagine what he would have looked at. Mostly,” Green says, “I just walked along and looked with my own eyes knowing that the only genuine homage I could offer was to make my own pictures.” Bickford’s work inhabits the life of Saco painter Charles H. Granger through his diary. For her performance at the show’s opening, she’ll conjure up a 19th-century portrait studio, inviting visitors to sit for minute-long digital portraits while she weaves tales from Granger’s writings together with patches of her own.

Catey Draper and Jill Dalton work with the fabric of history more directly. Draper’s installation was made in response to Victorian lace patterns; swathes from the museum prompted her to revisit fabrics from her own family’s history. In her lengths of meticulously-painted wallpaper she enacts the process of domestic labor, applying repeating patterns of a floral motif taken from a piece of lace handed down from her great-grandmother. Dalton has developed a different point of entry into the social history of textiles, and their ways of exaggerating womens’ bodies, with her creation of a gargantuan Victorian bonnet. Eight feet tall, the tent-like headgear creates a playful domestic interior that lets us inhabit history from the inside out, as if we were part of its wearer’s mental architecture.

Robert Lieber’s work, which will be displayed on the building’s rooftop, brings this larger-than-lifeness to bear upon the architecture of the Saco Museum itself. He was interested in the way the museum operated as a whole, as a kind of living catalogue of its proprietors’ interests and obsessions. He came across an entry for something suggestively referred to as “RAFT,” but no one seemed to know what or where this RAFT was. He decided to build it himself. Taking his cue from a bag of “Buddhist Beads” and a Buddha statue, he decided his RAFT would be a kind of lotus-blossomish enlightenment-vehicle-spacecraft sort of structure. Part of Lieber’s desire to create what he calls an “architectural prosthesis” draws from his interest in the cultural history of this part of Route One, with its Aquaboggans, Funtowns, and lobster pounds.

While Lieber’s museum halo represents a kind of mourning for the dissolving history of such outdoor Americana, Sharon Portelance’s tiny reliquaries approach this in a different sense, and on an intimate scale. Taking her inspiration from a 19th-century piece of “mourning jewelry,” a wreath made of human hair, Portelance made three small rings: each attached to a tiny box whose cover is a fitted with a lens that magnifies the box’s contents. One contains a gold wedding band, another clippings of hair, another clippings of fingernails. Each box wobbles on the shank of the ring instead of sitting still, echoing the fragility of the hair jewelry, and of the lives to which they spoke.

In their work “Prospects,” Evan Haynes and Stephen Dignazio display their meandering exploration of transcendentalism and American experience through the texts of 19th-century New England. They began with an interest in early field notes from amateur naturalists who collected birds’ nests and eggs. Haynes explains that “it wasn’t too great a leap to make the connection with nest building and weaving. Of course the textile mills provided the economic lifeblood of the community at the time that the museum came into being.” They became interested in exploring what life was like for workers in these mills, most of whom were women. The piece strings together a number of tiny revelations; for instance, they learned that women who worked in the mills were not allowed to bring books to work, but could bring single pages from books. Many put these loose leaf pages up all over their looms, and were surrounded by fragments of stories, as will be the visitors to this show. Haynes hopes that their piece will have a “dream-like quality that would slowly start to coalesce and come together as you find the threads that run through it.”

The Saco Museum had its literally illustrious start back in 1866 with a piece of what might now be called performance art. The founding group of businessmen and amateur artists and scientists inaugurated their institution by taking the first object that they had acquired, a bit of magnesium, and burning it . . . “for the gratification of the members”. An unimaginable range of exotic items, inventions, and specimens came to be added to the collection, though the magnesium seems to have been the only artifact ever to have been sacrificed so ceremoniously to the gods of Yankee industry and ingenuity.

“Inspired by Saco” is a dream made real for Exhibitons Developer Lauren Fensterstock, who conceived the show. She describes it as the project she’s been doing in her head every day since she began working at the museum. With artist and MECA professor Katarina Weslien and Bowdoin curator Alison Ferris, she chose the eleven artists who were invited to “come in and give us vision.” As she says, the museum is at an interesting point in its own history, as it once again tries to find a way to look forward and backward at the same time. “The show is a metaphor for that,” she says, “for looking at the past with new eyes.

 

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