Randy Regier: NuPenny’s Last Stand

NUPENNY’S

L A S T S TA N D

R A N DY R E G I E R

Welcome to the NuPenny Store...

Wherever it may be…

NuPenny exists as a traveling art installation under the guise of an intermittently accessible toy store. The first appearance of this toy store installation was in Waterville, Maine in January of 2010. Four months later and without notice NuPenny closed in Waterville and moved to another town. In the years since this work has appeared in Portland and Sanford Maine, Wichita, Salina, Hays and Lawrence Kansas, Miami Florida, Riverside Illinois, Bentonville Arkansas, and now in New York City. The 2016 appearance of NuPenny at Jim Kempner Fine Art is the first time that these works have been made clearly and intentionally accessible and available for acquisition.

There are a number of reasons why I created this body of work and continue to elaborate upon it. But most compelling for me is the exploration of the experiences and sensations of desire and longing. To attempt this I set out to create a physical place and occurrence that appears as if in a dream, familiar and believable yet somehow out of our grasp, both in the material sense and also slightly out of reach of our collective memory. Because of this the door of the NuPenny store has always been locked and all requisite text has been rendered in Teletype punch-tape code. The toys are abstracted from the realm of historical playthings but all original constructions of mine; none of the toys are or were actual vintage objects, nor are any of them made from toy parts.

All pieces in the NuPenny store are manufactured from 20th/21st century industrial, agricultural, scientific and household flotsam and jetsam and from scratch when necessary.

Conceptually each toy is my interpretation of a song lyric, poem or literary work that has affected me. By using the NuPenny/Teletype code card that is printed below one can easily (though perhaps not quickly) read the decals on each toy.

Finally, in keeping with the conceptual origins or inspirations of each toy, the NuPenny motto is quoted from and attributed to the following poem: Prayer in the Strip Mall, Bangor, Maine The week after Thanksgiving and the stores are decked out for holiday shopping including a TJ Maxx where what was once too expensive loses its value and attracts us, there is a store with a big yellow banner proclaiming GIANT BOOK SALE, a seasonal operation of remaindered books, which doesn’t mean that the books aren’t good, only that the great machinery of merchandising didn’t engage its gears in quite the right way and I buy two books of poetry and am leaving the store, the first snowstorm of the winter on the way and as I get to the glass double doors a bearded man with a cane is entering, he has been walking with a woman who is continuing on to another store and he has the look that could make him either eccentrically brilliant or just plain simple and as I open the door and he opens the other side he turns and says “I love you”, not to me but calling back to his friend who is departing, only he’s said it looking at me, closest to me, which is unintended love, random love, love that should be spread throughout the world, shouted in our ears for free.

by Stuart Kestenbaum

Best, Randy Regier

A r t i s t S tat e m e n t Randy Regier, 2016

I have made things as far back as I can recall, or at least have attempted to do so. The tension for so much of my childhood – and it was a very tangible thing– was that my youthful imagination always exceeded the limitations of my hand and access to tools and the necessary materials. The frustration I felt when I conceived of a toy or vehicle or thing that I could see so very clearly in my mind’s eye – but could not for the life of me realize as a real thing in the world, oh how that frustrated me. What I do now – via the very necessary detours of the auto body trade, art school, historical society assistant, vintage toy repair, etc. and etc. – is to have become competent enough to imagine a thing one day and realize it as an actual, autonomous thing on another. The Albert Camus quote, "A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened" I think, sums up all that I am trying to say here.

Scientists tell us the winds on Saturn can reach over 1000 miles per hour. One would desire a very robustly engineered kite for that Planet, and perhaps a sturdy protective capsule from which to enjoy watching it.

From Philip Levine’ s

poem

S ilent In America (1968):

“Let me have the courage to live as fictions live, proud, careless unwilling to die...”

This piece, a flying saucer tow-vehicle piloted by a great white ape, is as fictional as I could conjure and still be within the boundaries of a recognizable plaything. This toy requires courage merely to exist.

This piece inspired by a very wild ride through Haruki Murakami’s wonderful book, “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.”

Though I am an avid reader, across genres and themes for many years now, I can’t recall another writer or particular book that had me so wonderfully and sometimes terrifyingly displaced at the very push and pull of this writer’s whim.

I grew up in a largely rural, agrarian part of Oregon, in the Willamette Valley. I recall in the early '70s that my friends and I would play "army" - probably because the newscasts were filled with the carnal imagery of the war in Vietnam. All the while, we lived in what could be described (to this day} as a veritable and verdant Garden of Eden.

As a child, I didn't think of war and armaments and the horror of land mines as I do now. If there's a future for people who wish to work the land, removing the legion of mines might just be the final frontier, so to speak.

I’m an admirer of the Rage Against The Machine song, “Killing in the Name.�

This piece was an attempt to combine the aesthetics of a hot rod car (culturally and historically considered to be anti-establishment) with those of a police car (The Establishment). From just a bit of remove, the poles and polemics of these (and most) oppositional entities tend not to be far apart as they believe, or seek to claim.

The Red Wheel

ba r r o w

by William Carlos Williams

so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens

I made this during a Haystack Residency on Deer Isle, Maine. The wheel barrow is a simple, literal, toy-like construction of the title implement. I found a photo of a red wheelbarrow, printed it in gray-scale, and matched this gray paint to the print. This then is color matched to red, but in gray. As I tried to conjure what Williams' "rain water" might be, as a material component, I happened upon an actual canoe filled with rainwater. The still surface of the water looked like a silver sheet, reflecting the gray Maine sky. Thus this wheelbarrow is filled with the same.

Steel

(excerpt)

Heny De Witt Saylor, 1941.

From “Poems for a Machine Age”

I never see a skyscraper Without counting the terrible cost in wan faces.

N u p e nn y ’ s L as t S tan d 2014

i ns ta l l at i o ns :

NuPenny’s Last Stand, The Smoky Hill River Festival, Salina, KS NuPenny’s Last Stand, Riverside, IL

2013

NuPenny’s Last Stand, Hays, KS

2012

NuPenny’s Last Stand, Art Miami, Miami, FL NuPenny Service Center, Wichita, KS

2011

NuPenny Toy Store travelling installation, Wichita, KS

2010

NuPenny Toy Store travelling installation, Saco, ME NuPenny Toy Store travelling installation, Portland, ME NuPenny Toy Store travelling installation, Waterville, ME

NUPENNY’S

Jim Kempner Fine Art

L A S T S TA N D

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@JimKempnerFA