ASTRID BOWLBY: EVERYTHING

University of Southern Maine Art Gallery • Gorham, ME • usm.maine.edu/gallery • Through March 6, 2013

Astrid Bowlby, Everything (installation detail), 2012–2013, ink on paper.

Everything, Astrid Bowlby’s exhibition at the University of Southern Maine Art Gallery, is an installation project generated by an interest in, or maybe a compulsion for, abundance. Filling the large rolls of paper that drape the walls and cover the gallery floor with drawings of objects suggested by gallery visitors, the artist offers a visual litany of things that cohere as bumptious patterns. Reduced to raw brush and ink marks of simple picturing, Bowlby’s images develop according to the moments of available space, covering areas of paper as a series of improvisations with a simple methodology. Images do not overlap—Bowlby might employ them later, as cutouts for a future collage project—and images are fast, easy, and generalized, like representations from a rough graphic dictionary.

Bowlby’s process of populating the gallery with “things” gives rise to an evolving taxonomy of forms that would not have occurred as precise science or as a logical narrative. Since she does not construct the list of objects that are drawn—she fulfills it—the collection has a random feel. Its disparate elements do, however, interact like an erstwhile biology. Images shift identities according to the casual ambiguity of neighboring images. Squeezing forms together creates new intimacies—the creased form of the top of a fedora is nearly “penetrated” by a cigarette and the mirth begins. This dense conglomeration can feel overpowering, an oversupply of signals. The trick is in recognizing that this is art as environment and environments are not easily comprehended as wholes. Bowlby packs the space with a busyness that is alternately creepy, annoying, and hilarious. Objects emerge from their cluttered acreage, like sexy itches and irksome stings, insisting on response.

Everything suggests an idealism of the ordinary, a democratization of drawing. The gallery becomes the active studio, the workshop exposed before the intrusion of the mature control of art. The French painter Jean Dubuffet explored image invention set aside from official artistic traditions—art brut—seeking a raw and natural expression. Bowlby’s work is too informed, as was Dubuffet’s, for such authenticity, but it has the capacity to touch basic nerves, to overwhelm, to keep art provocative.

—David Raymond