On a beautiful July evening, art patrons filled the main hall at the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum. The French doors were wide open to the brick courtyard overlooking the hill to the garden below. However, the primary attraction for the evening surrounded the new art exhibition opening last Wednesday night titled “Objects for Objects: Work by Venetia Dale.”
Dale graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and then went on to achieve an MFA from State University of New York New Pautz, with both these educational degrees in metalsmithing. Currently, the young woman artist works as an adjunct professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee while also curating, exhibiting and teaching workshops throughout the country.
Speaking to her enthusiastic crowd that came to Villa Terrace to encourage her, Dale dedicated the exhibition to her parents who were sitting at a front table, her mother with a tear in her eye. They are also artists, and Dale asked her mom if she was crying. She claimed her parents, “made her observant of the world and open to new opportunities.”
The exhibition focuses on this premise because Dale looks at secondary objects (whose main purpose is to support the function of a primary object so the secondary object becomes more disposable) after they are discarded and then transforms them to a primary object, an artwork of higher value. While often considered merely back drops to everyday living, Dale's secondary objects include shower caddies and tossed away memorabilia.
Dale receives inspiration from her travels with two of her sisters, especially to Far East Asia, Thailand and Vietnam. Photographs presented in this exhibition document these references, including Motorbike Baskets With Chickens and Hanoi Market. The ubiquitous plastic woven baskets seen throughout America find themselves in use all around the globe, but within variable contexts. In Hanoi, the plastic baskets, similar to an American wash basket, were displayed holding goods for perusing in the tourist markets.
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Everywhere in the Thai markets as Dale went from booth to both she heard the vendors repeat, “Same, same, but different. Dale would ask a question, “Is this cotton?” “Same, Same,” the reply came. Then she would query, “Or is it polyester?” They would parrot back, “Yes, same, same, but different.” So these plastic baskets mimic the same objects everyone is familiar with although their values change within the given global market and their social context.
These are also the plastic basket fragments that Dale uncovers from cultural detritus, and then recasts in pewter, the very same baskets that Americans may use for holding garden supplies, toys or dirty wash. Her trio of wall hangings titled Touchmarks: Plastic Basket Fragments Cast in Pewter, change these secondary objects into imaginative sculptures created from the found cast offs.
The articulate Dale also derives inspiration form the social culturist Arjun Appadurai. According to Dale, his philosophy details how objects have a social life, a life through history that moves through various spaces and time. A concept considered true whether observing plastic bags, plastic woven baskets, shower caddies, or thrown away beanie babies, once stuffed objects collected as a popular commodity. These supplementary objects decrease substantially in market value after they've been outdated or outmoded, and Dale returns them to an increased value when seen as an art form.
Dale's work examines a society's accumulation, transforms an object for an object. Objects that are nestled, placed, piled, stored and used up. One of her freestanding sculptures in the second floor gallery Commemoration Occasion incorporates discarded tins and metal plates found in souvenir shops to create a pastiche of the past and then ultimately the present by recasting these now unwanted memories into another form: metalsmith sculpture. The copper patinaed monument envisions the forgotten memories that live again when trading one object for another. An object admired as an aesthetic assemblage invented by Dale.
The exhibition “Objects for Objects: Work by Venetia Dale” shows at the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum through the summer. For an interview with Dale on the rigors of metalsmithing and how the medium best expresses secondary objects, enjoy an interview with the artist at Art Talk next week.
