this rickety blasted beautiful world, just as it is
2022 - ongoing
Bicycle, training wheels, laser cut packing boxes
“This frightened, blasted, beautiful tender world, just as it is”
University of Wisconsin-Stout, Furlong Gallery, 2022
Laser-cut cardboard, tin cans, Styrofoam, toy bicycle and other materials
Installation views: University of Wisconsin-Stout, Furlong Gallery, To Freedom: Music, Art and Culture of Ukraine, Poland and Estonia
Featuring artists: Riivo Kruuk, Christina Shmigel and Monika Weiss
Statement
The installation at the Furlong Gallery, “This frightened, blasted, beautiful tender world just as it is” (2022) was initially inspired by the recyclers of Shanghai, China. Watching them load massive amounts of material onto their 3-wheeled bicycle carts, balancing the weight of their load, battening it down, navigating their carts thru narrow streets, I considered them the best sculptors in SH.
After some 13 years in China, we repatriated to the US; after we unpacked our worldly goods, masses of cardboard boxes remained to be recycled. As an homage to the SH recyclers, I determined to create a load of my own, built around the bicycle that had been my steadfast transportation through all those China years. But in the course of building up the blocks of laser-cut cardboard that would be the load, a cardboard city began to emerge. I recognized in it the brutalist architecture, particular to the Maoist/Soviet era, that had surrounded me in SH & is familiar in the outskirts of cities all over the world.
As I was constructing this project, Ukraine, my ancestral home, was invaded by Russia. What began in one time & place changed meaning and purpose with the change of circumstances. The flood of refugees into Poland & Europe paralleled the escape of my parents from Soviet-occupied areas of Western Ukraine during WWII. The images of humanitarian aid organizations providing emergency services gave new meaning to artworks acquired by my grandparents in displaced persons camps in Europe, still life paintings painted on cardboard salvaged from boxes of Red Cross food relief. The images of apartment blocks in Ukrainian cities, so like my cardboard tower blocks, decimated by bombs and fires made the edges of cardboard burnt by the process of laser-cutting suddenly fraught with anguish. The emptiness of my cardboard city became unexpectedly poignant. And yet... in the scale of my structures, in the toy-like logic of the construction, some innocence remained...
The title of the installation is borrowed from the essay Koans for Troubled Times by the American Zen teacher, Joan Sutherland. At such a turbulent time in history as ours, she asks, “What does it mean for each of us to be wholeheartedly part of this world?” How do we carry the loads we are given; how do we not shut our senses to a world eating away at itself thru conflict, disease, environmental disaster. How do we keep tender and full of wonder our relationship to the world, just as it is.
