Funky Philosophy

Funky mixed-media splendor can be found strewn around the Upstairs Gallery of Natalie’s Fine Threads at the moment, in “Temple of My Familiar” by the artist known simply as gauvin.

Ragged intersections of collage, painting, assemblage and even hints of installation art thread their merry way throughout the gallery. Echoes of folk art and junk art resonate here, but so does a unique mind at work. Most important, this is funk with a cause, namely an exploration of the artist’s own life, his heritage as an African American and his upwardly evolving voice as an artist.

Gauvin grew up in Detroit and elsewhere but has been in Ventura for a decade, working as a poet, performance artist and visual artist. His first public showing, in fact, was a few years back in this very space, and he has since shown at the short-lived but spirited Ventura gallery called Spork Orbit.

The current show is something else again. The first impression, one of a gregarious outpouring of color, texture and black American references, deepens on closer examination. So does the more rueful underpinning of the art, as it alludes, subtly and otherwise, to the displacement and oppression of life for African Americans. Collage techniques help emphasize the underlying street historian/social anthropologist spin of gauvin’s work.

Photographic fragments and cutouts refer to African Americans both famous and familial, including religious icons from the Yoruba religion.

The collagist instinct, the interest in drawing real objects into the art-making process, has inspired the artist to use the gallery in a site-specific way, as well. The piece called “Tell me how long the train been gone,” after James Baldwin, consists of two train images running diagonally up the walls of the stairwell, literally leading our eyes up the stairs. Painted on the wall is the phrase “momma dis place was a circus.”

The circus reference, beyond the realm of fanfare and fun, is obviously also a metaphor for mayhem and instability. That notion is seconded in the piece called “When I was dying in front of you,” in which a sad-faced clown is depicted in a piece that includes actual crayons for hair, dictionary entries on art terms and the personal statement “my coloring book is a work of fiction, any similarity to Actual events is purely A Case of Life Imitating Art.”

At the top of the stairs is another piece tinged with paradox: “Who said you had to be purr- fect?” is a life-size image of Eartha Kitt, taken from an old LP and rendered on corrugated cardboard, with bars in front suggesting the repressive forces at work even in the higher, more publicly visible level of black culture.

A similar image of restraint is seen in a self-portrait in the other room, with a hunched-over nude male figure behind a metal grate.

Joie de vivre and warmth also are to be found here, though. The piece “Temple of My Familiar” is part of a series of pieces that refer, cryptically, to a lively domestic heritage we assume relates to the artist’s own past.

But it’s fragmented, like pieces of a puzzle that may or may not have enough clues to become whole. “I couldn’t see the bored” is painted on chalkboard, that instantly nostalgic surface from childhood, and loosely portrays a neighborhood. Is it reconstructed from a dream, from memory or both? In this art, contrasting elements seem locked in a power struggle without a clear sense of a victor. Pain and joy, order and chaos, pride and despair jockey for position, which is, in the end, what gives the work its strength and intrigue.

DETAILS

“Temple of My Familiar” by gauvin, through March 11 at Natalie’s Fine Threads, Upstairs Gallery, 596 E. Main St., Ventura. Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 10:30 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sunday, noon-4 p.m.; 643-8854.

Josef Woodard, who writes about art and music, can be reached by e-mail at joeinfo@aol.com.