Arts & Entertainment A weekly guide to music, theater, art, movies and more, edited by Rebecca Wallace
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on’t call it “mixed-media.” This sculpture by Ryan Carrington is screws in plywood, plain and simple as it is intricate. Carrington bought each screw off the shelf at Home Depot, all 6,892 of them, and installed them in a big piece of wood to create a painstaking plaid pattern. Nothing pre-painted, nothing computer-generated. Just art by hand. With screws and plywood, electrical wire and hard hats, and the occasional snow blower (he is from Wisconsin, after all), Carrington often uses art to pay homage to people who work with their hands. “It honors their perseverance and loyalty in taking unglamorous jobs seriously and executing them with both incredible precision and an artistic touch,” he wrote in an artist’s statement. In “Heavy Routine,” one of Carrington’s sculptures on exhibit at the Community School of Music and Arts in Mountain View, a cast-iron hard hat crowns a pile of sand bags, arranged neatly with cast-iron work gloves and a sledgehammer. Nearby, he’s made more plaids on plywood, using a carpenter’s tool called a chalk snap-line. When you pull a string taut and snap it, it lays down a line of chalk. “Those plaids essentially are tens of thousands of snaps with this tool,” Carrington said. “There’s a nice parallel to the repetitive motion of creating the drawings and the repetitive motion of manual labor.” In a way, Carrington’s art has brought him full circle into the family trade. As he puts it, “I come from a landscaping family” near Madison, where he worked in his brother’s landscaping business. He’s also been a construction worker and a maintenance man. “I’ve always had a background working with my hands,” he said. “I feel like there’s a relationship between sculpture and work ethic.” His brother, Carrington said, appreciates the tribute. “He is a quiet man, but I know that he is really proud to have had such a huge influence on me and my art,” the artist Above: The two old men of Steve said. When Carrington had his MFA show at San Jose Davis’ “Time Piece” face off at Mohr State University last year, his brother surprised him by Gallery, while the eerie realistic flying out to see it. “Bianca on Her Sister’s Birthday” The current CSMA show, “Social Observations,” is a peeks around a corner behind them. two-artist exhibition that also features fellow sculptor Left: “A Line in the Sand” by Davis. Steve Davis. In a way, Carrington and Davis have been on Below: Ryan Carrington’s “Heavy parallel paths. They both have master’s degrees in fine art Routine.” from San Jose State, where they work at the university’s foundry. Both teach at CSMA, and earlier this year they teamed up on a sculptural public-art commission called “Children at Play” at San Jose’s Guadalupe Park. The two artists, though, have very different voices. While the tone of Carrington’s work is often earnest and
VISIONS IN by Rebecca Wallace | photographs by André Zandona
ARTISTS SEE THE WORLD IN WEIGHTY MEDIA: BRONZE, SCREWS AND ALUMINUM
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