Andrew Mowbray: Bathyscape

May 18-June 30, 2007

Guest writer: Laura Donaldson, Director Mills Gallery, Boston Center for the Arts.

“In the recent past people have redefined and united communities based on race, religion, gender and sexual preference, often as a reaction to a perceived white heterosexual male majority. I believe many of us still continue to perpetuate the 1940’s and 1950’s paradigm of this male role model. With these thoughts and questions of contemporary cultural and social issues, I often wonder where I fit in.” -Andrew Mowbray

What does it mean to “be a man”? Although gender relations have an impact on almost everything we do, the critical study of men and masculinity is a relatively new development. While it is recognized that males tend to occupy positions of advantage in patriarchal societies, there are significant variations on the notion of masculinity even within western society. Over the past 4 years, Andrew Mowbray has gradually focused on the development of performative alter egos that embody the artist’s quest for insight on contemporary notions of masculinities. These performance works have been central to the development of a body of work that is mostly sculptural, however, it also includes video, photography, and painting.

Andrew Mowbray’s performance Walden Pond (2004) established a clear reference to Henry David Thoreau (1817-1868), an American author, abolitionist, naturalist, transcendentalist, tax resister, and philosopher, who choose to live simply but critically in natural surroundings. Another of Mowbray’s performances, Just For Men (2005), after the popular men’s hair dye, referenced in a tongue-in-cheek manner a piece by Janine Antoni titled Loving Care, a title she derived from the hair dye for women that shares the name. Just For Men explored the changing roles of men and women in both the domestic and workplace settings, as well as exposed the male struggle with hegemonic masculinity notions in a post-feminist society.

Relying on ‘ready-made’ sources of masculinities among white, middle-class males of last two American centuries, Mowbray’s imagery repository explores the discrepancies and fragmented complex nature of manliness notions, the difficulties of getting past these, and the risk of relying on these constructs as suitable sources for qualitative analysis of gender issues.

Andrew Mowbray was born near Plymouth Massachusetts in 1972. He went on to study sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art (BFA, 1995) and at The Cranbrook Art Academy in Michigan (MFA, 1998). Awarded several prestigious grants in New England (The Artist’s Resource Trust Fund of the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation 2005, Massachusetts Cultural Council 2005, LEF Foundation New England 2004), Mowbray’s work has been exhibited mostly in the Northeast United States, and most recently as part of the traveling exhibition Pattern Language: Clothing as Communicator at the Krannert Art Museum of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, the Tufts University Art Gallery, the University Art Museum UC Santa Barbara, and the Frederick R. Weisman Museum, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. He currently teaches sculpture at Wellesley College.

If you have the chance to sift through Andrew Mowbray’s sketchbook, the one contained in a specially constructed white box with carrying handle and what can only be described as a little urinal stitched in pink in relief on the cover, it is worth the time to have what is akin to a behind the scenes view of the artist’s thought process. Influences are compiled and riffed on in this collection of loose pages, with drawings, photographs of his work and others, diagrams and notes, questions and reminders written to himself, arrows and notations explaining the connection between multiple and disparate sources like Earth, Wind and Fire, John Travolta striking a pose in his white suit from Saturday Night Fever, Duchamp’s iconic The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, and fishing paraphernalia, and that’s just the beginning.

You’ll find the inspiration derived from much of what is in the sketchbook on display in Mowbray’s newest work, Bathyscape. It is like a guide to his oeuvre; most, if not all, of the elements of his past bodies of work can be found here. It’s fun to try and connect the dots, but by no means is the work lessened without knowing all the allusions and subtexts. Visually arresting, calling to mind a Victorian display cabinet, a bit of Rube Goldberg, and both the skillful elegance and brute force of manual labor, the piece is composed of four main parts; a giant bellows, a four-sided cabinet, a wall of framed fishing flies, and a performance enacted by the artist with the participation of the gallery staff. Almost entirely custom made by Mowbray, the installation is primarily alabaster white - a color that runs throughout his work, most notably in the white suits he makes for himself out of unlikely materials such as Kevlar and vinyl. In its totality, the translucent glowing whiteness is otherworldly, surreal, sci-fi and pure, only interrupted by the shocks of Mowbray’s hair used to make the flies.

Combined with the white space of a gallery Bathyscape evokes a laboratory with the artist as both the scientist performing experiments, and the subject under study. The cabinet is the central focus of the installation, and is based on the idea of a turn of the century diving ship, used to explore unseen worlds first-hand. Self-contained and snug, the cabinet is tethered to the walls and ceiling of the gallery with rope and to the bellows with hollow tubes. Inside, with bulging windows on all sides, the better to observe and be observed, Mowbray sits in his white suit on a little cushion at a workstation. Dangling behind him to the left and right are white picture frames that mimic the shape of the windows. Sitting at his station Mowbray snips a locket of his hair and begins to make a fishing fly with it. As intricate as the construction

surrounding him, the fishing fly takes nimble fingers and concentration. Once completed, Mowbray places the fly in one of the frames and clips it to a pulley system that runs out of a small hole in the bottom of the cabinet. As the frames come out an assistant from the gallery hangs them on the adjoining wall in a pre-determined pattern that spirals out the left and right, mimicking the dual whorls of Mowbray’s own cowlicks.

The analogy of temple and high priest can also be applied to Bathyscape, particularly in the enactment of a ritual and the fetishistic sacrifice of a bit of the artist through his hair, a pound of flesh on the altar of art so to speak. Hair has long been a symbol of identity, and object of remembrance. Nowadays of course it carries the possibility of containing ones DNA, the ultimate bit of remembrance.

At the same time as he is making the flies, Mowbray has the gallery owners busy pumping the bellows to provide air to the cabinet. It is a cabinet of curiosities, with the artist as main curio. It is also a comment on the symbiotic relationship of artist and gallery, of handicraft to commerce. This performance is enacted without an audience, before the installation will be available for viewing, much like a solitary artist making their work alone in the studio; the act of creation is private. The performance will be on display in a video documentation accompanying the installation. In similar fashion Palingenesis displays the objects used and provides photo documentation of a performance by Mowbray at Walden Pond. In this installation the dichotomy and intertwining of masculine and feminine roles and identities, another hallmark of Mowbray’s work, is highlighted. An oversize pink creel, a basket to hold fish, also resembles a sewing case. Wearing a white suit adorned with tiny urinals as buttons (an homage to Duchamp) and touches of pink stitching, the photos show Mowbray with a rod and reel held at the waist like an extension of the male anatomy, fishing at Walden Pond using his handmade hair flies. There is something of the dandy in Mowbray in his white suit, and the shots of him casting his reel and scooping the water with his white net resemble an elaborate mating dance, fully outfitted.

Without the overwrought theatricality of some performance art, where the artist as star overshadows deeper interpretations, in Mowbray’s works the artist is portrayed as slightly quixotic, if not completely impractical. He injects the seduction of beautiful objects with solitary introspection, and a bit of humor, making the sparingly useful seem imminently necessary.

Laura Donaldson, May 2007