Review: Ben Stagl’s Unfolded at Gallery HOMELAND

To dig into Ben Stagl’s tour-de-force solo show, the best place to start is at its center. Unfolded, like all exhibitions at Gallery HOMELAND, flows through an angular lobby that twists through the Ford Building (SE 11th & Division).

In the heart of the building, in the main space on the north wall, is a piece called “First Snap.” And if your daddy was a carpenter, you’ll immediately recognize the single straight-if-splattered line as created by a carpenter’s chalk line. It hovers diagonally, simply in the center of a long sheet of paper. And its import as metaphor is central, because anything built is only as good as the first snap and its perpendicular.

And that line is the introduction to a tremendous exploration by Stagl and a cast of collaborators: a collection of drawings whose skeleton is the same straight line, folded paper reliefs executed with Alison Heppner that toy texturally with plane, and a series of sculptures that lean against a wall, hug the floor, and soar through the central space: explorations of intersecting planes executed with vinyl/paper, wood ribs, and cord that suspends them in space.

And as Stagl moves through two dimensions into three he finally creates an enclosed volume, a “room” constructed of four short fabric “walls” hung from a rudimentary frame. The “Curtain Room” is suspended just above head height and contains a pedestal with three Viewmasters stocked with photos of the “Room” suspended and falling from and being carried in locations throughout Portland. It also appears in a suite of stereoscopic photos and a video. The “Room” is so interesting because in its many appearances, it loses some degree of its object-ness and becomes an actor, blowing, moving, falling.

Back to the beginning: What Stagl has done is rekindle my interest in drawing (the D.E. May show at PDX Contemporary had the same effect) which has been dulled by the figurative/Royal Art Lodge/son-of-comic onslaught of similarities. And this is because he’s folded the world beyond the plane onto the paper. His “Folded & Clad” (above) is brilliant, capturing many of the spatial concerns he’s long played with in two dimensions, its colors making it appear ancient, patina-ed, poetic. I appreciate, too, the wall drawing integrated into the sculpture, “Pleats of Matter,” which deliciously has elements of both shadow and schematic, locating this sculpture specifically in space and commenting on its structure. If “Folded and Sewn Shut” (Diptych), which faces “Pleats,” is less successful in context, its because its lines are littered with arcs, and the arc has an awkward place in this exhibition’s conversation of point, line, plane.

Not that all is linear in Stagl’s sculpture. Their best moments are those in which they are permitted to fail, the planes sagging and swooping, gravity and lack of tension confounding the perfection of the best laid plan(e). As much as I love John McCracken’s “Black Block,” the cube is no longer as interesting because given its history, it no longer represents risk. Stagl’s sculptures here embody risk, reward, failure. And that’s why they soar. Although the central piece, “Unfolded,” is most majestic, the almost hidden sculpture down a long hallway beyond the restrooms—with planes that are slumped and crumpled—is not to be missed.

Unfortunately, I can’t comment on the sound work Stagl made. The playback devices were malfunctioning when we visited on a day quiet enough to hear them.

Many of the pieces are collaborations. I just wrote about Anna Gray and Ryan Wilson Paulsen who have been working in close collaboration for some time. I could, if I liked, tease apart the contributions and concerns of each of those two artists, but it strikes me that their practices are tightly intertwined, blurred, with infinite feedback loops.

In the case of Stagl, I’m imagining that some of the collaborations were more involved than others, and I admire him for getting outside his own head to address some of his concerns. But collaboration, can sometimes simply be a matter of bringing another party with a needed skill set to the table. And so the results are uneven. The “Fashion” photo series Stagl did with Angela Dawn is beautiful in its color and texture, but doesn’t add much to the conversation going on in the rest of the exhibition. The folded studies he created with Alison Heppner, by contrast, play a central role. They also speak to a closer collaboration, a working through of ideas, and I would have loved to see a dozen more.

In one of his statements about the show, Stagl references Gilles Deleuze, whose reading of Leibniz concerned the fold or the notion that a continuity achieves differentiation through folding as with a labyrinth. That, for example, there are not individual works by Stagl, but that they are all aspects of, folds in, the greater unity of his work. But Stagl is playing with us, with a double entendre, having taken the concept of the regular old fold we all know and love and explored it thoroughly in a deft slight-of-mind that gives the viewer a little something extra to chew on.

Stagl leaves for grad school in fall. Unfolding sends him out with a bang.

photos: Calvin Ross Carl at OPENWIDEpdx.com.

POSTED: June 23rd, 2009 | AUTHOR: lisa | FILED UNDER: art | TAGS: alison heppner, art, ben stagl, calvin ross carl, gallery homeland, matthew allen woolridge, openwidepdx, portland artist, review | No Comments »

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