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Road Thrills

Fourteen artists look at life through the windshield

By Ann Elliott Sherman


Rabbit Run: Fleig's "I Could Be an Accident on the Freeway".

Road Trip. Whether the thought conjures daydreams of windblown freedom or nightmares of nonstop, hellbent confinement, one thing is a given on America's highways: You're bound to see something strange, horrible, wonderful or some combination thereof. Redemption Through Rubbernecking, 14 artists' look at life through the windshield, is true to that experience.

Mechanical fun and games are here, thanks to Amy Ruddick's play with fate, Toy #2--turn the key, and the road beneath buckles like the Bay Bridge in the Loma Prieta quake. For anyone who ever tried to appeal to a parking officer's compassion, there's Kenneth Renaldo's accelerator-operated ticket-writing machine, Meter Devil's Heart.

The Kitchen Sisters (Davia Nelson and Nikki Silva) turn in Route 66: The Mother Road, a tribute to that mythic American highway of yore. Essentially an audio historical documentary, the piece borrows its title from the writings of Studs Terkel, who is featured on the tape along with Woody Guthrie, dialogue from the movie Grapes of Wrath, Jimmie Rodgers (the Singing Brakeman) and others. The artists' adept weaving of oral history, readings and popular culture reminds us that California has always been a destination for those with nothing left to lose but their dreams of a better life. One only wishes the visual component--oddly, a road map of the Bay Area, rather than the route's current incarnation as Interstate 40, out of Barstow--offered half as much.

The video and newspaper clippings documenting The Coffin Walk I & II, a performance piece by Jesse Bercowetz and Michael Plaza, known collectively as Armpit, fail to translate the experience of their 298-mile journey lugging a coffin sculpture and toilet wagon from Chicago to St. Louis in any meaningful way. (Or maybe the whole thing was a grinding exercise illustrating the gap between theory and praxis.) The decidedly amateurish video plods along with the duo, whose terse hikers' dialogue competes with the gravelly crunch of each footstep and traffic's Doppler effect. Not particularly amusing, insightful or innovative, it elicits about the same reaction as Armpit got from Prairie Staters en route: a shrug.

Much more inspired, K.C. Rosenberg's Dogaspora: The Traveler's Special cooks up an interactive billboard highlighting excerpts from New York poet Elinor Naven's scorching invective, Wiener Roast. The ubiquitous mushroom-toqued chef with the "Frenchy" mustache who signals "OK" on roadside greasy-spoon ads here presides over dancing utensils and waltzing hot dogs. A series of pulleys activated by the viewer raise flaps that reveal additional epithets just off-kilter enough to carry the ring of true fury. Rosenberg visually places Naven's rage behind the wheel, fueling all-night drives at suicidal speeds.

When the rubber no longer meets the road, Amy Youngs uses it to make what can best be described as shadow-ring assemblages. Whether impossibly lovely like the Armor-all and emerald satin gleam of Scooter Tire Briefcase, or as witty as Vanity--a Firestone Supreme, hub framed with clear Christmas mini-lights, lined with red velvet, and filled with assorted rear-view mirrors--Youngs' refined aesthetic gently manages to lampoon the American automotive fixation by rendering it into tomorrow's nostalgic collectible.

But the biggest impact (pardon the pun) is made by William Degen Fleig's installation, I Could Be an Accident on the Freeway. A cockeyed chamber of horrors covered with Fleig's crude charcoal drawings on stitched-together butcher paper, seams painted with Betadine, it presents a world populated only by stone rabbits with cast-wax exposed vertabrae, distant traffic and the demons of an uncertain obsession. Repeated images of an unlatched gate, a wide-open mouth, red rabbit targets, daisies, rocking chairs and Xeroxed childhood snapshots combine with permutations of the same words over and over to imply a traumatic narrative fractured by a disturbed mind.

When actual fish-hook needles and sutures juxtaposed with a drawing of a snagged lip send you looking for the way out, the parting message scratched into a metal plate is "You could be a catastrophe waiting to happen," followed with a loud boom triggered by the weight of your step. A lethal hit-and-run on our pathological fascination with violence, or a stylized exploitation of it? Even if Fleig might have our collective number, oo-whee, I'm relieved mine is unlisted.

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