The Curator's Eye: Bellwether 2010: Bellevue Art Walk
- — May 31, 2010
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This year will mark sculptor Michael Johnson’s first appearance in Bellevue’s Art Walk; his two pieces, Get a Handle on It and Monument to the Ordinary will be installed in City Hall and Downtown Park, respectively, the two endpoints on the map of the citywide sculpture walk. Monument, actually a giant milk can (above), was still in the process of being built at the time of this interview. Fabricated from mild steel that is sandblasted and patina-ed and sealed, the twelve-foot-tall structure will weigh hundreds of pounds, but according to Johnson, it will look as though it weighs thousands of pounds and will show no signs of having been welded together. “I want it to look like it was born like that,” Johnson explains, a hint of mischievousness accompanying his Rhode Island accent. This isn’t his first rodeo. In 2008, a series of giant but elegant wooden chess pieces he created temporarily invaded the Hammering Man’s space outside the Seattle Art Museum. But he is excited about the pioneering scale of this project: “My indoor works are just large enough so that people don’t buy them. Thank God I have a job,” he jokes. From a glance at the photo gallery on his Web site, Johnson’s body of work resembles a shelf you might see in an old-world toy maker’s workshop. There are rows upon rows of whimsical forms and elaborate shapes, elegantly crafted from sleek materials. In some cases, it looks as if he’s taking everyday objects, like a soap dish or a whisk, and blowing them up so that we might laugh or marvel at our own weird world, like Alice among the salt and pepper shakers. On the other hand, he’s not Claes Oldenburg, who created the giant Typewriter Eraser at Olympic Sculpture Park. Johnson abstracts these objects so we appreciate not the oddity of a pencil eraser looming over our heads, but the beauty of simple things like lines and curves that lie around us all the time. |
FOCAL POINTS Hometown: Providence, RI Day job: Associate professor of art at University of Puget Sound Self-described: Talk-radio junkie Studio location: In the woods somewhere on the Key Peninsula Number of pieces showing at Bellwether: 2 Time spent to make the milk can: 100+ hours Sculptors he admires: Martin Puryear, Richard Deacon, Constantin Brancusi Exotic locales he’s visited: Slovakia, Budapest, Tokyo, Waco Studio "partner": a blue heeler named Tess Advice to young artists: "Be honest." |
In the case of the milk can, his approach to making sculpture is more of a personal imperative than it is about setting up a punch line.
“I always try to look at things really close to me for inspiration. It’s hard for me to think about work based on someone else’s experiences. I can’t make art about the war. The only thing I know about the war comes from CNN.”
While researching Bellevue, Johnson says he decided he wanted an image that was mundane, but nostalgic – symbolic of things that don’t exist anymore, like the ferry that used to serve Lake Washington in lieu of a bridge. He came across the milk can.
“These are things people used to have on their front porch,” he says. “My parents did. My mother even put flowers in them. They were almost like outdoor sculptures in people’s yards – not that I realized that then.” •
Bellwether 2010 is a citywide public art installation, open June 26 - October 17.
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