AMO Art Show Features Discarded Materials

WAITSBURG -- Call them the bone yards of the industrial age: old factories, warehouses, stock yards, substations, fabrication shops, foundries.

You can find them everywhere, including in our towns right here in the Touchet Valley. Just think about Wait's Mill after it burned or the apple packing plant near the railroad tracks.

These structures of the past aren't just empty buildings, hangars or basements. They have an economic biography and a body of work in the form of the products, tools, equipment, supplies and the utility innards that energized the physics needed to make what they made.

To many observers, these items that have lost their original function, if not their technological edge, simply represent piles of rusty scrap, insurance liabilities or eye soars in the landscape. At most, they would seem to have some minimal value as recyclables.

Not so to the Geasland brothers and the other artists bringing together some of these Rust Belt rejects as reborn sculptures at the AMO Art gallery on Main Street this month. The show opened on Saturday with an artist reception and will run through Dec. 31 by appointment.

Sixteen pieces, all titled using the letters "SOS" as an acronym, are assemblages of welded, bolted, wired, soldered or otherwise bonded objects from a bygone era that have found new meaning or function through the artists' sometimes whimsical, sometimes emotional, sometimes political re-creation.

Called the "SOS Studio," the mission of the group behind the exhibit is "to resign, build and challenge the material of our daily existence," according to the show's introduction.

"In this exhibit, you will find the discarded material of our society. This material is built with purpose of a day gone by and at some point found useless. our challenge is to see new purpose in these materials and incorporate them for use in our daily lives."

The main duo behind the show sponsored by AMO owner Claire Johnston are brothers Andrew and Abe Geasland, who both hail from Louisiana and each bring their unique background to this art form sometimes known as "post-industrial primitive."

Abe, who still lives in New Orleans, was drawn to design through his selfdirected art studies at Franklin & Marshall College near Philadelphia, an area filled Rust Belt treasure troves.

He is a well-established furniture designer and sculptor in the Big Easy. His productive focus is on lamps, large time pieces and tables. His one-of-a-kind pieces make him a "studio furniture" designer, arguably a form of art because of the creativity that goes into the fabrication of each unique item.

Andrew, an electrician for Alaska's North Slope oil industry, came to it from an everyday hands-on interest in shaping industrial utilities anew and acting as a mechanical midwife to the rebirth of found objects.

He divides his time between the tundra and his home near Pioneer Park in Walla Walla, where he has a work shop/studio dedicated to the physical montage of the brothers' artistic visions and those of other collaborators. His yard is full of reassembled machine and factory parts from grain augers to tractor wheels.

Artistically, Abe is inspired by Marcel Duchamp, the French artist whose work is most associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements.

Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamps influenced the development of post-World War I Western art. He advised modern art collectors such as Peggy Guggenheim and other key figures in the art world, thus helping the shape the western taste of Western art during that time.

Duchamps is perhaps best known for pushing the boundaries of artistic processes and art marketing by calling a urinal art and dubbing it "Fountain" and a shovel "Prelude To A Broken Arm." His artistic interests and expressions ranged from oil painting and glass to kinetic sculptures and music.

Although the pursuit of making furniture and sculptures is nothing new to the Geaslands (as boys they had their own bone yard of leftover materials from their father's log home construction business), the brothers only recently discovered the compatibility of their skills and visions.

From shelves of found objects rummaged from local demolition sites, scrap yards and garage sales, the Geaslands try different combinations of items and let their shapes, original function and prospective new function guide their creative process.

"Each piece calls out what it needs to be," Andrew said. "Sculpture has no boundaries. The challenge is to design from found objects (that already have a form evocative of function and intent)."

Sometimes, the results are quite absurd, the brothers said. The suspended piece called "Sandanista Overnight Solution," for instance, is a combination of a rocketshaped hood ornament attached to a gear box with a cut-glass light fixture behind it suggesting a ship shape.

Found buried in his yard when he bought his Walla Walla house, Abe used two plastic Toy Story-like Hispanic superheroes to mount atop the galactic vessel vaguely reminiscent of the Nigaraguan rebels who toppled an erstwhile Banana Republic dictatorship.

The brothers compare the combinations of components to the notes making up freeflowing jazz compositions: as an assemblage they either work or they don't.

Meanwhile, the brothers are extending the life span of objects - from glass electric insulators and steel clutch plates to wooden foundry dies and ceramic lamp shades - made to last much longer than their industry's product life cycle allowed and far longer than their cheaper modern counterparts.

And, they're honoring the creativity that went into designing these deceivingly mundane- seeming items whose ultimate shape still had to be forged by minds who took some pride in the resulting look and feel.

"Sometimes, we forget that people are creating things on an everyday basis -- anonymously," Andrew said.