THE WORLD ON A DESK

Barbara Taylor / Seattle

Carl Chew's exhibit, at Davidson Galleries, of small vignettes about desks and human endeavor features three installations of full-sized desks with accompanying drawings, prints and objects found on the desks. Curiously, the drawings for the desks were made before the construction of the actual desks, and the objects were made as duplications of the drawings, like reverse still lifes. Because Chew has also made the walls behind the desks, he creates in this installation the feeling of being present in fragments of rooms that are personal—desks and spaces that could belong to any of us and have been left in disarray, revealing things we had been working on and collecting. The seeming disorder draws us into the work, but it is Chew's use of color - playing off rich primaries against gray and faded sections which captures our attention. This, coupled with a sense that the whole show is about life's vanities, makes the work visually and intellectually effective.

Each desk piece has its own subject. One, called Desk for the Study of the Curious, is about a person's indulgence into the study of similarities among the weevil, the wart hog and the elephant, hoping to find a biological connection. The desk, rich with color and dense with material, is covered with remnants of suggested correspondences between and about the creatures (such as a blueprint of a possible prehistoric crossing of paths, a postcard called the Texas Boll Buster, a wart hog tusk, a book titled Ways of the Weevil) and with functional objects representing the animals. The place Is also concerned with the viewer's rising curiosity to learn more about this study, but the enticed viewer can only meet with frustration because the temptingly movable files covering the desk's surface, which seem to enclose further information, cannot be lifted aside. Hence, the piece's title takes on wider meaning.

Chew's Red Ball Desk Installation, though less dense with matter and complexity, Is more revealing of his history as an artist. The desk centers on two Items: a framed letter on the wall above the desk and a large red ball near the desk's center. By reading the letter, sent by Edwin Diggs, a prominent figure in Chew's work, we learn about the history of the desk's generation, about Chew's association with Xerox stamps and also about his satirical humor. Balls, particularly red, appear everywhere-on a drawing above the desk showing projected bounces of four primary-colored balls, on blown-up stamps tacked onto the wall above the desk, on the windowsill above the desk, in a photograph of a little girl holding a red ball, on the desk itself and as the title of a book on the desk. Chew uses the red balls in the same way he uses other materials, primary colors and subjects—to play off simple, elementary concerns against human complexities. It is as though he hopes that the ball form will dominate and be able to simplify life itself.

Chew's paintings, drawings, prints and desks about his work, his work spaces, his concerns and correspondences are dense with absorbing matter and are intelligent without being intellectual. Although he says his pieces are not conceptually unified—"I'm making desks," he states—they are brought together by his satiric wit, which is based on the things that relate to his activities and the objects he produces: stamps, balls, desks. His work comments on our experiences of reality by using as a connection to that reality the creation of potentially true but actually illusionary events and ideas that involve the materials he uses.

Chew is present in his work, by either photographs or letters, and his "presence" in this way makes his satire and wit immediate. Chew's stance is, at the same time, as a participant In life, the creator of the parody, and as the audience or onlooker. He talks while he works, which becomes a part of the pieces he produces and the ideas he evokes. He reminds us that although his attitude is humorous, it is also serious, because the subject that triggers his work is human folly and vanity.
 

Barbara Taylor is chair of the English department at Bush School, Seattle.