Gallery Photo
The artist with his “Run Around,” acrylic on plywood with rotating panel.
Many artists play with visual ideas, but artist Bob Gregson quite literally wants you to touch, rearrange, wheel, walk, and even spin his painted constructions at Creative Arts Workshop.
Just do it gently while you think big thoughts about order, chaos, and maybe even Wonder Bread.
The serious fun is at the heart of Out of Order, the new audience-involving exhibition of brightly painted wooden wall-hung and free-standing mobile constructions on view on both the first and second floors of the Creative Arts Workshop galleries on Audubon Street. The show is up through June 30.
Gregson is a widely exhibited artist who combines vivid colors, architectural forms, and movement for the purpose of getting an audience to engage — not only by looking, but by interacting, and questioning their most fundamental ideas about art, form, and meaning.
It sounds heavy, but it looks and feels precisely the opposite.
When you walk into the galleries you could be forgiven for feeling you’ve entered a kind of playground. The wall-mounted pieces ask you to rotate them so they fit into new relationships with the pieces around them, lining up different shapes and colors.
The sets of frames on casters — they’re called walkers — invite you to wheel them around, again lining up different elements, but this time from a more sculptural perspective.
Why does a horizontal line give rise to one kind of feeling and then when you make it vertical another? When you play with the movable arm of Gregson’s “Double Dealing,” as I did, you engage in some refreshing thinking without words — what artists call visual thinking. It’s a mode of thought that non-artists rarely immerse themselves in.
Gallery Photo
“Double Dealing,” acrylic on trupan with rotating panel.
When I crossed the two pieces, there was an almost-crucifix. All those religious and art historical associations suddenly flooded in.
While most of the pieces welcome you with their bright colors, in the upstairs gallery Gregson has some constructions in more muted browns and blacks. Lest you think these are less diverting, these pieces also have elements with mirrors instead of colors so you can watch your own hand turn and change the form in front of your eyes.
Of course, you don’t have to have a tactile experience to enjoy the work. Looking itself could be enough, as it was for CAW’s Development Manager Jan Daddona on a recent tour of the exhibition.
Dadonna with “Ricochet” and memories of Wonder Bread.
As she stood in front of “Ricochet,” Gregson’s 2011 acrylic on wood construction, she had an association from childhood. “I’m standing in front of this and it makes me think of Wonder Bread,” she said.
“It’s the dots,” replied a reporter.
There followed an extensive down-memory-lane conversation about the texture of the original Wonder Bread package, the amount of air contained therein, the circus packaging to appeal to kids, the tactile pleasures of squeezing a loaf, and how your mother could actually make you a lunch sandwich using such stuff.
“One of the ‘trips’ for me is that you don’t have to look for a deeper meaning. You can stand here and smile and check in with your own sense of fun,” Daddona added.
On Sunday, Gregson, who recently turned 70, had about that number of his friends and admirers come to the exhibition’s opening reception, Daddona reported.
He’s going to be giving a gallery talk on June 6 at 7 p.m., and the show, which is the very definition of an attraction for the whole family, is up at CAW through June 30.