Road to inspiration An intriguing exploration of the artistic process By Bill Rodriguez
	WORKING THE WORK We all have plenty to learn from artists, even if we can’t say what it is when we’ve learned it. Modernist innovator Marcel Duchamp was generous enough to return the compliment, observing that spectators play a crucial part in the creative process, "deciphering and interpreting" works well into posterity. That goes double for arts administrators, whose job it is to pull their chins and assess what work should be waved onto the greased chute to land before the rest of us waiting spectators. Those at the Rhode Island Foundation who brought us the current exhibition have learned a thing or two about artists and creativity, having focused for some time on the process. The gallery’s director, Anne Rocheleau, made a connection to the exhibition and visual art when listening to alto sax virtuoso Oliver Lake earlier this year at AS220. Passion, she says, is a nexus to creativity. "If something is communicated passionately, it’s because it’s responding urgently to a human issue," she suggests. Wanda Miglus, co-curator of the show, learned by visiting contributing artists in their studios that time constraints can jump start an artist into productivity. "It takes a great deal of courage on the part of an artist to work open-ended — they know that they have to get it done at some point, but time can be a real challenger, a foe sometimes in that you feel pressured by it," she says. Nevertheless, Miglus observes, many of the artists did better when they slipped into the rhythm of a deadline "and allow[ed] the process to dictate the outcome." Primary curator Claude L. Elliott is a program officer at the foundation, in charge of administering the New Works Grant. "We were trying to get an insight into how an artist works and thinks and develops a concept, and the changes that may take place that we don’t know about," he says of the request to the 14 artists that they present their works-in-progress with an emphasis on the nuts and bolts of making it. With written work, he notes, there is always the frustration that much is lost because no one these days types a hard copy of draft after draft, saving all the hand-written revisions. Fortunately, playwright and actor Rose E. Weaver had "something like 10 different versions" of her playscripts for Menopause Mama to draw from and display. Elliott was fascinated with how examining the rehearsal photos of Weaver will reward close attention: we can see that she eliminated the role of a grandson by her final draft, to make the play flow better. "The one that really worked for me and really helped me structure this exhibition was Jonathan Sharlin and his artist book," he says. "His work in the exhibition is almost exactly the way it was when I walked into his studio. "For the exhibition, he wanted to clean it up and type things neatly," Elliott adds, "and I told him please don’t do that, that’s not the intent." The creative process is far more interesting to observe when we can see it with warts, stumbles, backtracks, cross-outs and all. — B.R.

Creativity is a pretty broad concept. Not only artists and poets are proud of it, street hustlers and international jewel thieves lay claim to it too. The current exhibition at the Rhode Island Foundation Gallery aims to shed some light on the esthetic end of the effort.

New Works: An Exploration of the Creative Process displays the 2000-2001 output of 14 artists and arts organizations under the foundation’s grant program for new works.

The idea of the show is to let us peek at the gears and pulleys behind the scenes of making art. When that concept works in these presentations, we glimpse an artistic choice or two. When the creative process remains hidden here, at least we get to see the interesting results, however veiled. (As Geoffrey Rush’s character in Shakespeare in Love keeps enthusing about theater, it’s a mystery.)

Sometimes previous work by an artist can be a telling context for a piece. Michelle C. Leavitt’s Woods View simulates a stained glass window onto a bucolic, leaf-strewn scene. That image is given a bit of poignancy, and the accompanying Beach View — a window and window-paneled door — are all the more shocking, when they are all seen together. The latter depicts helicopters intruding on a rocky seashore, and the event inspiring the diptych is recreated in a bonus dimension: a small boom box loops not only the sounds of lapping waves and gulls, but also the thump of whirling blades approaching and receding. The separate image of trees suggests that the helicopter images were a departure for Leavitt, that they came from an emotional as well as a political place.

Creative problem-solving is usually invisible by the time we get to see a work. But with Souvenirs and Legacies, by Thomas F. Morrissey, his ah-hah! moment is evident in the very medium he chose — lenticular photography. We’re used to seeing the like on novelty key chains that, say, alternate night and day views of the Statue of Liberty or show a face winking at us. Thin vertical strips refract different images, depending on our angle of view. Morrissey combined fragments of hand-written correspondence with photos of his mother when young and old, the four views never changing completely but rather shifting and rearranging. The collage acquires the movement of cinematic montage, which is so appropriate when the subject is as dynamic as memory. The artist also produced some accompanying conventional documentary photos in Cuba during this period. They make us aware that the lenticular technique provided an answer for Morrissey, not a gimmick.

In the case of the intriguing-looking instrument/sculpture by composer Steven L. Jobe, Bosch’s Garden, the exhibition allows a visual aid that will be sorely missed when the instrument is played upon. A reproduction of Hieronymous Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights is supplied, depicting the model for the improved-upon contraption — Jobe’s is more gracefully curved — amidst a mass of humanity.

The creative process is laid out most explicitly with Salvatore Mancini’s contact sheets of large-negatives, showing the visual choices that the photographer could draw from. Whether shots of an old mill or mountain fall foliage or a whale dead on a beach, we see the various compositional variations he considered.

Similarly, since written work usually emerges from a linear progression, looking over a writer’s crossed-out corrections and careted inserts can help us follow how and what they consider to be improvements. We have a double opportunity as some storyboard drawings by Deanna Camputaro accompany a screenplay by Don Mays, although only the barest sample is presented. A more helpful sequence is the extensive display of Jonathan Sharlin’s Art Book Project: Cast a Cold Eye. The photographs and text for his 35-page book attempt to document how over five years his mother’s illness affected her as well as relatives and caregivers, who provide written commentary.

Of course, it is in officially posted Artist Statements that the real inside skinny on the creative process is supposed to come clear. Unfortunately, jargon (if the artist is an academic), vagueness, or incomprehensibility is the norm. In this exhibition we do get the occasional inkling of what led to the work before us, though. Director, playwright, and puppet-maker Vanessa Gilbert informs us that the new works grant for The Jane Eyre Project provided her a six-week sabbatical, for example. She reminds us that it’s hard for creativity to happen after a grueling day job, even if it’s at Perishable Theatre. A mute, droll statement is provided by Gilbert as she includes such books as The Handbook of Beauty and No Nice Girl Swears among the source books she displays.

On a serious note, the landscape sculptures of Gabriel Warren, as impressive as they are, are more meaningful when we know his intentions. Rhegmalogia: (eumeclasteia) has a formidable presence, with dark rounded stones emerging from (submerging into?) a tall brushed aluminum rectangle. The word he made up for his series is Greek for the study of fractures or breakage, he informs us in a wall statement. Knowing that, we are invited to step back from our felt sense of the object he created, with its tension between the technological and the natural worlds, and ponder the nature of artistic making itself.