A rock-solid body of work for an island artist
Published 12:11 pm Saturday, April 26, 2008
Gary Groves mounts a 30-year retrospective at Art Grice’s place.
Gary Groves admits that he nearly backed out of his own retrospective.
“I don’t have any rear-view mirror,” he said.
Longtime friend and island poet John Willson concurred, as did studio and gallery owner Art Grice.
“He’s the kind of artist that you can’t pull away from the piece that he’s working on, unless he has a good reason,” Willson said.
But peer pressure eventually won the day, and tonight at Art’s place, the community will see three decades’ worth of Groves’ work in a show titled, “A Look Back, 1978 to 2008.”
A few days prior to the opening, Groves, Willson and Grice took a break from hanging nearly 70 pieces, a densely arranged collection of drawings, etchings, woodcuts and photographs whose volume took the artist himself by surprise. Groves, Grice and guest curator Deborah Paine had chosen so much work that they had to erect a central wall, and now the task of hanging it all by Friday night’s preview loomed dauntingly.
Groves is no stranger to labor, though. He and Willson met in the early 1980s doing house remodeling projects on Restoration Point, where they spent their breaks tempering physical labor with cerebral communion.
“Our lunch hour would be spent talking art and poetry,” Groves said.
As Groves read Willson’s poetry drafts, and Willson critiqued Groves’ works-in-progress, the two found common thematic ground, particularly, as Willson put it in an introductory essay he wrote for the show, where the natural and the man-made worlds – and where abstraction and representation – intersected.
Groves, for instance, found endless inspiration in concrete bunkers, which, long after their practical use had passed into historical oblivion, had become part of their landscapes.
He also frequently traveled to southeast Washington, where he’d stand on the Washington side of the Columbia River and photograph rock formations along Highway 14.
Lewis and Clark traversed their trail in the vicinity of Rocky Flat, where cars now rushed obliviously by. Yet his photos, and later the bordering-on-abstract prints that the raw footage inspired, represented nothing less than endurance itself.
“I’m interested in trying to pull something from the rocks that most people go by and will never see,” he said.
Willson, Groves observed, does the same thing with poetry as he captures places of historic significance like Gettysburg while at the same time nailing everyday occurrences in a visually lyrical way.
“To have that kind of bond with someone in another discipline is a good thing,” Willson said.
The process of assembling this body of work, and having guest curator Paine add her own take on the order and grouping of pieces, has brought home a realization that Groves understood intellectually but sometimes had trouble putting into action.
Which is, built-in rear-view mirror or not, the importance of looking back from time to time, and to allow audiences to form their own perspectives on a body of work.
“It’s not that we’re naive about what we’re doing – it’s that different people view (your work) differently,” he said. “Viewers bring something new to it.”
Groves recalled the speech he made at his 60th birthday party, about how fortunate he feels to have the wherewithal be able to pursue his real love, “that precious little thing.”
The same holds true at the cusp of 70.
“I feel sort of an obligation to make the most of it because so many of my friends didn’t have that privilege,” he said. “It is a rare opportunity.”
And, he added, one that might not have been possible without the community he’s built over all this time.
“This is what this is really all about,” he said. “It’s about friendships.”
Endurance
See Gary Groves’ retrospective through May 25 at Arts Studio, with an opening reception from 5-8 p.m. at 7869 Fletcher Bay Rd. Call 842-1294 or 842-7154.
