Stephen Hendee, Sorcerer (detail), 2006

mixed media, dimensions variable; site-specific installation,

Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO

The following is an introduction by Kemper Museum curator Elizabeth Dunbar excerpted from the exhibition brochure:

Stephen Hendee and Phoebe Washburn fuse architecture and landscape to create larger-than-life sculptural environments that energize the gallery space and physically and mentally engage viewers in a dance between exploration and observation, while also subtly commenting on the significant social and/or geo-political issues affecting the world today. Both artists share a love of low-tech, common materials and possess a punishing work ethic (and perhaps sense of absurdity?), creating extremely labor intensive temporary installations that require weeks of dedicated work on site, only to be dismantled and destroyed at the exhibition’s termination. Despite these commonalities, however, Hendee and Washburn pursue much different “deliveries”—Hendee’s works are graceful, seductive, and ethereal, while Washburn’s are clumsy, impulsive, awkward, and terrestrial. Commingling in a single space, their respective works suggest the meeting of heaven and earth.

In Ping-Pong Diplomacy, Hendee’s and Washburn’s worlds collide near the middle of the gallery, where a rudimentary arena holds center stage and provides the conceptual nexus for this experimental exhibition. Designed by the artists in tandem and reflective of their hybridized aesthetic, the arena—replete with a functional ping-pong table and bleacher seating for Museum visitors—serves as a playful metaphor for the peaceful resolution of conflicting strategies, ideas, or philosophical approaches. It is a site of stimulating exchange, but also prudent and peaceful compromise. Hendee and Washburn face off against one another in the spirit of friendly play, using their works to volley ideas and approaches back and forth across the physical space of the gallery as well as within the conceptual arena of the mind.

While lighthearted on the surface, the exhibition also explores more serious content, its title paying homage to the 31st World Table Tennis Championship of 1971. This tournament held in Nagoya, Japan, provided cover for discussions between Chinese and American delegations that led to a visit to China by the United States Table Tennis Team. Within hours of the team’s arrival in the People’s Republic of China, President Richard Nixon announced trade and travel initiatives between the two countries. Nixon’s historic visit occurred the following year, symbolically marking the restoration of Sino-U.S. relations, which had been cut-off for more than two decades. As Premier Zhou Enlai of China recalled, a tiny plastic ball bounced over the net and changed the world—an idea not lost on Hendee and Washburn, whose works subtly suggest the global repercussions of sub/urban sprawl, namely, the need for oil, land, and water; the subjugation of the poor; lack of recycling and wasting of the world’s resources—all of which may lead to conflict or war, which then necessitates increased diplomacy.

New York-based Phoebe Washburn resurrects the dreary, exhausted, and superfluous materials of an urban, post-consumerist society by re-purposing them into patchwork landscapes that please and surprise while simultaneously raising notions of recycling, sprawl, and environmental sustainability. Zany, chaotic, and homely, Washburn’s behemoth installations testify to contemporary society’s messes and excesses—they are eccentric monuments to a disposable culture. For the Kemper Museum, Washburn has created Everyone’s a Giant (2006) an encompassing, undulating patchwork hillside that hijacks half of the gallery space. Everyone’s a Giant is pieced together from hundreds of plywood scraps scavenged from construction sites or found in loading docks, alleyways, and dumpsters. Aided by a platoon of assistants and student volunteers (their number and ranks changing daily), Washburn constructed Everyone’s a Giant over the course of nearly two weeks. She and her team, armed with electric drills and a seemingly endless supply of screws, labored slowly, using, for the most part, a single, simple, repetitive technique.

While slow and laborious, Washburn’s process is also spontaneous, intuitive, and organic: her installation evolves as it so desires, guided only by the artist’s very rudimentary sketches. Describing herself as an “anti-builder builder,” Washburn aligns her practice with that of “spontaneous architecture,” a loosely defined type of construction that makes use of whatever materials are at hand (or can be scrounged up) and then put to use in inventive ways. Shantytowns, one of Washburn’s inspirations, are a perfect example of this kind of freewheeling, improvisational, and unwasteful architecture—where poverty, need, and ingenuity merge to form areas subsistent on the detritus of wealthier neighbors. And like this type of architecture, nothing is superfluous in Washburn’s work; almost irrationally, Washburn finds a use for everything that went into the work’s making—even empty boxes of screws are incorporated in some way. In the end, the installation reveals the story of its own making, and it is, indeed, a tale loaded with surprise.

Among the surprises in Washburn’s installation at the Kemper Museum is the incorporation of live plants that, over the course of the exhibition, are intended to thrive in their own micro-environments, offering green patches of live nature. Tucked below the ramplike structure, these verdant areas portend an optimistic future in which life arises (and perhaps even flourishes) amid what are often the most inhospitable of circumstances. The plants—which, in typical Washburn fashion, are not highly prized specimens, but rather somewhat generic plants or, as the artist puts it, “growing greens”—further strengthen the work’s poetic relationship to landscape, visually as well as conceptually. And, as viewed in the context of a Midwestern museum, the patchwork installation easily alludes to a topographical map of rolling farmland, with its alternating plots of crops and fallow land—land that impending sprawl threatens to overtake.

Stephen Hendee’s Sorcerer, although devoid of earth (or any organic material, for that matter), brokers an equally strong connection to nature and landscape, albeit through a technophilic lens. An ethereal yet towering and invasive range of glowing crystalline formations, Hendee’s installation carves space from the surrounding gallery (even completely obscuring it at certain points) to suggest the rocky outcroppings, caverns, tunnels, valleys, and crevasses—all smoldering with artificial light—that might appear in a futuristic video game, a far off planet, or an imaginary world. Unlike Washburn, who pursues a matter-of-fact approach in that her methods and materials are unselfconsciously exposed, Hendee applies something of a magician’s touch, conjuring apparitions whose making remains as mysterious as the objects themselves. Hendee’s construction process and materials of choice, however, are anything but magical; he deploys simple handcraftsmanship and a low-tech arsenal of translucent corrugated plastic sheeting, fluorescent lights, hot glue, and black tape. Yet when transformed into geometrically complex, multifaceted forms that spread through the space, few viewers recognize the constituent parts, overwhelmed instead by the sophisticated and awe-inspiring environment that envelops them, offering discovery and wonder at every turn.

To create an environment of such gigantic proportions and such structural and formal complexity required hundreds of hours of labor and the involvement of numerous individuals. The artist followed an initial plan he drafted several months ago, but gave himself ample latitude to respond to the unique nature of the site, with its idiosyncrasies and subtleties, and to alter course as warranted. Unlike Washburn’s installation, Sorcerer did not originate as a direct response to the Kemper’s space or Washburn’s work, although both certainly had an effect on its outcome. Instead, it existed as a general idea for a work based on the 1953 film Le salaire de la peur (Wages of Fear) and the 1977 remake, Sorcerer (Hendee often looks to film, literature, music, and mathematical theory, among other sources, for inspiration). While the film’s existential storyline and the 1977 soundtrack by Tangerine Dream provide a loose framework for Hendee’s underlying formal and conceptual ideas, the films’ details need not be known in order to glean meaning from the installation. Hendee, rather, interprets moments of emotional and psychological depth through his interfacing passages of light, color, structure, and line.

Nature’s fusion with the synthetic is the hallmark of Hendee’s enterprise—perhaps not entirely unsurprising given that Hendee lives and works in Las Vegas, a city synonymous with blatant yet seductive artificiality, spectacle, glitz, and fantastical dreams, but which also ironically lies amid a strangely beautiful desert landscape bordered by snow-capped mountains. The most rapidly growing city in America—whose anticipated sprawl will have staggering environmental, economic, and social repercussions for generations to come—Las Vegas symbolizes how the artificial and technological are annexing and ultimately transforming the natural world. Once only the stuff of science fiction novels, films, and the virtual realm of cyberspace (all touchstones for the artist), the techno-organic landscape is not far from becoming reality, a future Hendee perceptively suggests in his spectacular, synthetic sprawl.

On the surface, it may appear that Stephen Hendee and Phoebe Washburn come from very different camps; their installations, other than being massive and engaging, look little alike. One is solidly earthbound, the other seemingly cosmic. One is geometrically ordered, the other appears out of control. However, a closer reading reveals that the two are connected in myriad conceptual, formal, and material ways. And it is the discovery of these commonalities, the ideas that bridge divergent approaches, that is most important to this exhibition, as it is in sport, politics, and, ultimately, life.

Elizabeth Dunbar

Curator

Stephen Hendee was born in Santa Monica, CA in 1968. He currently lives and works in Las Vegas, NV. He received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and his MFA from Stanford University. He has had solo museum exhibitions at the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; the Birmingham Museum of Art, AL; the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA; the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC; and the Rice University Art Gallery, Houston, TX.

Phoebe Washburn was born in 1973 in Poughkeepsie, NY. She currently lives and works in New York, NY. She received her BFA from Tulane University, New Orleans, and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York. She has had solo museum exhibitions at the Hammer Museum, University of California, Los Angeles; the Weatherspoon Art Gallery, University of North Carolina, Greensboro; the Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell University, IA; and the Rice University Art Gallery, Houston, TX.