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Twin Town High (vol. 8) |
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Glen Riddle @ Nina’s Coffee Cafe
Wednesday 20 November @ 09:36:49 |
 by John Tribbett
Tucked amongst the historic stone buildings of St. Paul’s Capitol Hill, Nina’s Coffee Café is playing gracious host to online gallery Behind the Forest’s showing of artist Glen Riddle’s Bygones and Boundaries: Wall Assemblages and Installations.
On the Cutting Edge Between a Rock and a Hard Place by Glen Riddle
As a boy growing up in the isolated reaches of the South Dakota plain, Glen Riddle’s father would leave his small jewelry store to take him scavenging at the local dump. It was here the genetic legacy of the collector was passed and his life was impregnated with the shaman’s plight. Riddle has been charged with the task of scouring the graves of our common moments for those leftover shadows, unattached and haunted, that yearn for a final resting place.
Rusted, antiqued, used, worn, handled… all code words incanted to divine the presence of ritual energy bestowed by former users into the forks, scissors, jawbones, keys, twigs, rulers and clasp-hooks that populate his assemblages. Through formal arrangement, each piece becomes a ghost-town meditation—a mandala of scavenged bones mixed with the skeletal remains of a forgotten farmhouse otherwise left to go to dust on the high plain.
He gathers these random objects from garage sales, antique stores and the woods near his Hudson, Wis., home. “I can’t not collect things,” Riddle says. “Sometimes I come home and there will be things by the backdoor.”
“The Curse of Shelter” is dominated by a lone tortoise shell displayed on a slab of oxidizing industrial iron. The abandoned animal part is surrounded by decaying pliers, bone fragments and expired shutoff valves. In “Elegy for the Tin Man” it appears as if a surgery tray filled with calcium fragments and metal innards is waiting for the alchemists return to resurrect life. “Let Them Eat Crow” morphs two dozen forks into a saw blade amassment bound by thick wire mesh. Its unifying core is adorned with a humble bird shaped cookie cutter.
In Riddle’s devotion, he has turned the result of his artistic process into a medium of clairvoyance between our collective past of everyday moments, the pagan psyche of the forest and the invisible spirit world. “It’s almost trancelike for me to sit with the objects and move them around. Or not move them and just sit and look at them…sometimes for hours.”
The power he brings to each particular combination is in the divining of its archetypal echo, in allowing the artists subtle intuition to formulate the gestalt.
In Bygones and Boundaries Glen Riddle has created a uniquely Midwestern set of industrial totems that at times invoke visions of a somber Mad Max landscape, but more often beg the world to be quiet so it can hear the whisper of a lost child’s laughter as it fades across the swaying dance of endless wheat fields.
Bygones and Boundaries continues through Dec. 7. BTF Gallery @ Nina’s Coffee Cafe, 175 Western Ave. N., St. Paul, 651-292-9816. www.btfgallery.com.
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