A dangling sculpture of hangers. A violin wrapped in yarn, feathers and beads. A collage of Polaroids found on a New York City street — just some of the installations you can find at Fountain House Gallery’s newest exhibition, Re/Invention.
Artist Boo Lynn Walsh, explores Maxx Reith’s contribution, Precious Memories, which features found photographs from NYC with Angela Rodgers’ yarn-covered violin Lady Sings the Blues on the opposite side of the wall. Photo: Brennan LaBrie
All 30 pieces in the show were crafted with rescued or upcycled materials by New York City artists living with mental illness. Their canvases include a skateboard, a cello and a part from a printer, and materials range from charcoal to charging cables.
Each piece tells a story of reinvention for both the materials and the artist that repurposed them, said show curator Vermillion. The Harlem-based artist pitched the exhibition two years ago and teamed up with Tara Sansone and John Cloud Kaiser of Materials for the Arts to bring it to life.
“I love the complexity of reinvention, and the complexity of reuse,” she said.
Vermillion’s vision for this show stemmed from her artistic practice, which is rooted in recycling materials. “It’s not that I just reuse them so we don’t throw them in the garbage, I reuse them because they inspire me and I can transfigure them and have them be a metaphor for how I feel,” she said.
Vermillion, who curated Fountain House Gallery’s new exhibition Re/Invention, with her contribution to the show, Brumhilde, made from reused tile fragments and thrifted plates. Photo: Bradford Scott Stringfield
Her contribution to the show, titled Brumhilde and Edeltraud, features clocks — their bases composed of tile fragments from her old bathroom and pieces donated by friends, and the clocks created from porcelain plates she thrifted. One clock is set to New York time, the other Transylvanian time, demonstrating the separation between the artist and her homeland.
Vermillion has found herself in a state of reinvention many times in her life – she moved from Romania to Hungary to work as a journalist, and then to Louisiana to pursue graduate school, before arriving in NYC in 2001. She discovered writing in Budapest, photography in Baton Rouge, and making art from reused materials in NYC, 10 years ago.
She was forced into another period of reinvention last year, when a fire tore through her Harlem apartment. Living in temporary housing and mourning the home, the art and the cherished possessions she lost in the fire, art became her salvation. While she regained her footing, pieces of her old home — like fragments from her favorite chinaware — were reborn in her mosaics.
“Mosaics are a metaphor for pulling the shattered bits of me, together replacing missing bits with makeshift yet similar findings and creating a functional wholeness, a new way of existing, a new useful cycle,” she said.
Susan Spangenberg’s Beethoven Healing Doll, Michael Kronenburg’s Mementos and Frankie Silva’s Hanging Dual Polyhedrons are some of the works on display. Photos: Brennan LaBrie
Vermillion points to fellow Fountain House artist Susan Spangenberg’s Ludwig van Beethoven doll — composed of acrylic, chalk, charcoal and colored pencil on stuffed canvas — as an apt metaphor for the show and its artists.
“Beethoven reinvented himself somehow and managed to compose vigorous work, even if his physical health was damaged,” she said. “I relate that with Fountain House’s artists — in spite of what happened to our minds, we reinvented ourselves.”
While Vermillion is well versed in bringing found materials into her work, it was a new direction for Michael Kronenburg, who specializes in painting and drawing comics.
In one of his two featured pieces, the devil and a horde of demons are depicted on a metal plate Michael pulled from a discarded printer on a Crown Heights sidewalk. The image, painted in acrylic and ink, speaks to the banality of evil – with current national news serving as inspiration – and the “canvas” represents a personal demon of Michael’s.
“I worked for 24 years as a graphic designer and art director in the garment industry, so printers were the bane of my existence for pretty much my entire adult career,” he said. “Always one damn thing after another…printers and hell, they kind of go together.”
Re/Invention, which runs through March 4, will also host a fashion show featuring upcycled materials, a terrarium building workshop, and a “fix-it and repair” session. The gallery is located at 702 9th Avenue. Hours and details on the exhibit can be found here.