There’s been nothing slow about Washburn’s ascent. While a grad student at New York’s School of Visual Arts, she was a standout from the start. “We all thought, Wow! This is pretty amazing, something that was beyond a student sensibility,” recalls painter Gregory Amenoff, who was one of her professors and now chairs the visual arts program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. “She made these sophisticated sculptural statements from the lowliest materials possible.”
Detail of lily pads and duckweed floating in a pond in the artist’s studio.
Of course, she’s not alone: Low-tech, gritty art built with what many would consider rubbish is hardly a new idea. (Think Schwitters and Rauschenberg for starters, and more recently, works by Tara Donovan and the late Jason Rhoades.) Still, notes Amenoff, “It’s very hard to transform everyday materials. And it’s especially hard to manipulate them in such a way that you’re aware of them in the context that the artist creates, not in the context that you see them in every day. That’s one of the things that makes Phoebe so fresh and original.”
Chelsea gallerist Zach Feuer came to the same conclusion after Amenoff and Jerry Saltz (another of Washburn’s SVA instructors and now New York magazine’s art critic) urged him to drop by to see her work. In June 2002, one month after graduation, Washburn had her first solo show at Feuer’s gallery. Her maelstrom of cardboard, wrote Kim Levin in The Village Voice, “engulfs the gallery like a force of nature.”
Like many artists of her generation, Washburn favors a process-oriented approach that roams freely among artistic disciplines. Her second show at Feuer, an installation titled Nothing’s Cutie, in 2004, was built using painted strips of wood and drywall screws. That it looked like an exploding shantytown was an “unexpected, happy accident, a by-product,” Washburn says, acknowledging that she’s drawn to images of favelas. “I do find them very powerful and beautiful, but I’m not romanticizing building out of trash, where people have to solve problems out of necessity as opposed to being an artist tinkering.”
Installation view, Between Sweet and Low, 2002, cardboard
Washburn was still tinkering with her ideas for Nothing’s Cutie the day Feuer brought Los Angeles collector Dean Valentine to her studio. “It was like walking into the underside of the bleachers at Shea [Stadium],” recalls Valentine. “It took up the whole apartment, and I was just flabbergasted by the combination of the rawness of the crap she’d picked up on the street and her formal control over these vast expanses. And there was Phoebe, who’s very attractive, with a carpenter’s apron around her waist and a hammer in her hand. I thought the whole thing was crazy and sexy and charming.”
Comments
Post a Comment