I work with skin and bones. The earlier boat forms, such as Ark, are the skeletons, a world body falling apart, bandaged together. Sandblasted, cleansed, erased. The forms become transcendent when they stop functioning: no longer utilitarian, they become spiritual. The "Plan" drawing over 15 architectural drawings is the plan that supposedly can save us: an urban songline, a walkabout.
Last week I made the first "rock skin." The energy that dries them is geothermal: heat coming out of the rock. The skin is made with latex tropical rubber tree sap-- vulcanized to withstand heat and cold. Like our own, it is naturally mould and fungus resistant, durable, and waterproof when dry. Walking through the woods I found a young pine tree. A porcupine had eaten a section of the bark around the base. The sap came down to cover the wound with a milky yellow skin slowly hardening. Like white blood cells.
When the "skin" comes off the rock it removes fragments of shale, lichen, earth, twigs, insects, which become embedded in it. It records in detail where it came from, becomes a writing, a scroll, but not human writing. The different thicknesses, densities, materials in the skin create a sculptural image of the earth's surface warming, and connect it to human skin when light shines through. When I make them I shed my skin and replace it somehow: a sense of death, and resurrection.
I am also making skins from trees, and old boats. A project called "Pine: The Trudeau Project" combines both and involves canoeing into an old growth pine forest in Ontario, and making skins on the trees, like bandages. These would be partly removed and photographed on site, lit by the sun. The canoes, like Ark, will be partly wrecked with holes in them covered with translucent fiberglas. Like a warming earth, aging bodies, they float but the water and light show through. Other explorations are on old lath walls in abandoned farmhouses in eastern Ontario (e.g. the Mason house) and in abandoned quarries (e.g. Belmont Rose Granite Quarry).
The work is an exploration of the relationship between interior and exterior form, structure and history. It is about possession. "Ark" and the skeletal boat forms are taken apart so that they can go back in time; the "Nomads" oil tanks are opened up like bodies; the sandblasting is the sound of history passing.
The other material in the skins is gauze - Gaza -- an ancient material used to swaddle infants and corpses. Swaddling clothes, and shrouds. First there is the body of the earth. This body is cleansed, scraped dry. It tries to walk ("Ark" in New York), to fly. Finally it is embalmed, so it can rest. All that is left, is a membrane, and light. The membrane is the boundary between two worlds. It comes from the rock on the shore, from the Boat in which we are rowed across the River, to the other land.
The light weighs 21 grams. A body, at the moment of death, weighs 21 grams less than it did before. The weight of the soul.
For more information go to artists website:
Richard Watts
Crowe (Deer) River Studios
Richard Watts is a Canadian/American artist, originally from a Mennonite farm in Kansas, and Chicago. He moved to Toronto in 1987 and has worked in the city and, more recently, at Crowe River Studios since that time. His work is in public and private collections, including video work in the collection of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. He has shown throughout Canada and in the U.S. Some of the work explores environmental issues between the two countries, and has received feature print and television coverage.
Crowe River Studios is a developing environmental art centre, located on a wooded acreage and in a converted barn on the edge of the Canadian Shield, beside the Crowe River in eastern Ontario, between Toronto, and Ottawa (Peterborough County).
The barn and woods are a working studio combining creation, production, exhibition, and education in an environmental context.
Recent works include the "Skins" series-- latex and gauze "prints" or "paintings" created from Shield rock faces, trees, and vintage boats (2009), the site-specific "Ark" under the Manhattan Bridge (2007), and a series of skeletal steel forms along a salmon river in Kelowna, British Columbia (2006). In summer 2008 six cottage boats were altered live in front of Edmonton City Hall for The Works Festival, according to climate change themes, including a CBC presentation: Art In the Mall.
Developing projects include sculptural boat forms beneath the Gardiner Expressway in Toronto, Ontario, and related prototypes at Crowe River Studios. These works are part of an ongoing endeavor, the Travelling Ark Project, in which altered transportation forms related to water and energy systems become environmental installations across the continent Ark's children.
The boat forms, archetypes of collective and individual life cycles and journeys, refer to the way the continent was originally traversed - in wood, bone, and skin crafts on the lake and river system - as well as to the vehicles of European colonization. The forms remind us to protect what remains.
I am interested in connecting with the education system to provide an opportunity for youth to experience art in a different manner than might usually be presented, to do arts education projects related to the work I am pursuing (such as group projects combining sculpture and architecture, skins from a school bus or in the landscape, etc), and to expose youth to alternative architecture as a number of people in the area near CRS are trying to build their own homes in a progressive manner related to climate change.
Although Crowe River Studios is an environmental art centre, it is also an applied arts studio, as my contracting--carpentry, woodworking, and renovations--has funded many of the art projects. In this way contemporary art theory and conceptual art, and the artisan tradition, are combined.
Commissions
2009 Shortlisted for a 2nd Kelowna Commission; Prequalified Artist, Toronto Transit Commission, for new GO station/subway lines.
2008 Lock. The Works Art and Design Festival, July 2008, Edmonton, Alberta: six
boat forms reconfigured with an environmental theme in front of City Hall.
Interviewed for Calgary Emergency Operations Center, July 2008.
2006 Run. Mission Creek Greenway Public Art Commission, City of Kelowna, B.C.
Three 20 installations involving skeletal steel boat forms beside a salmon river.
Developing Projects
2007- Water Line: Gardiner Project involving reconfigured Great Lakes wooden boats suspended beneath the Gardiner Expressway, Toronto, in conjunction with Fort York National Historic Museum and the Toronto Public Art Committee, Temporary Projects.
Mobile Art Circus installation involving Nomads oil tank sculptures/bus, other elements, to travel along U.S./Canadian border.
Exhibitions/Residencies
2010 Pine: The Trudeau Project, site-specific sculpture/performance work involving Tree Skins in an old growth pine grove. Interested venues: Art Gallery of Peterborough, Art Gallery of Kelowna, Canadian Canoe Museum, others.
2009 WaterLine prototype exhibition, Crowe River Studios, August 09. Peterborough Lakeside: site-specific work for Peterborough Artsweek Sept. 09. "Skins" in Engine Gallery, Toronto, Distillery District July/Aug. '09, Dec./Jan. '10.
2008 Artist-in-Residence with new work at The Works Art and Design Festival, Edmonton Alberta.
Residency with Mark Dion/JMorgan Puett, New York, May 2008, to create the Mildred's Lane Museum. Collaborative project which showed at Alexander Gray Gallery, NYC.
Crowe River Studios "New Works", October '08.
2007 Ark in DUMBO, July/August
2007, Brooklyn Bridge City Park, under the Manhattan Bridge, Brooklyn, New York.
2005 Ark at DeLeon White Gallery, Toronto. February/March '05. Solo show.
Camp in XXX, Visual Art Ontario's 30th Anniversary Exhibition. Art Gallery of Thunder Bay, Ontario; Art Gallery of Algoma, Sudbury, Ontario; Queen West Toronto site-specific at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health.
Herd and Plan site-specific installation at Ontario Ministry of the Environment.
2002 Scadding Court Community Sculpture Garden Project. Artist/facilitator. Toronto Arts Council Community Development Grant.
Camp, in Rogue Wave. Site-specific installation, Toronto Islands.
2000 Camp, in Near Blighted: A Study in Urban Decay. Open Space Gallery, Allentown, Pennsylvania. The Tent Project, in Mayworks Labor Arts Festival. Toronto City Hall, Nathan Phillips Square. Site-specific installation.
1998-99 Expressway, in Art for Earth's Sake. The Millenium Project/Modern Fuel Gallery, Kingston, Ontario. Site-specific installation, Cataraqui Cons. Area.
1997 Couch Paintings. Site-specific house installation, Toronto.
1996 Architectural Sculptures in Art Metropole, Toronto.
1994 Expropriations. Gallery 76, Toronto.
Awards
2003 Ontario Arts Council Emerging Artist Grant
2001 Canada Council Travel Grant
2000 Ontario Arts Council Emerging Artist Grant
1998 Ontario Arts Council Exhibition Assistance Grant
1994 University of Guelph Graduate MFA Scholarship offered
1993 OCAD Sully Corth Memorial Scholarship, Sculpture/Installation
1986 Loyola University of Chicago Predoctoral Fellowship
1984 University of Kansas Undergraduate Honors Scholarships
Education
2006 Admitted to MFA Sculpture Program, York University, Toronto
Also University of Windsor Sculpture Program, Windsor, ON
1997 BEd OISE/UT, secondary level/OAC.
1996 MA Diploma Program, Toronto Art Therapy Institute; BEd, OISE/UT
1995 Scholarship to MFA Sculpture Program, University of Guelph
1994 BFA Sculpture/Installation, Ontario College of Art and Design
1987 Predoctoral studies, Loyola University of Chicago
1985 Honors BA, University of Kansas
Reviews:
For the Kelowna commission, five regional print articles, two cable interviews and one cable program, also cited in Sculpture Magazine, April 07, Commissions-in-Brief.
For "Ark" in Brooklyn:
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, half a dozen Brooklyn arts reviews
The Globe and Mail, Simon Houpt and Elizabeth Renzetti, July 21, 2007: "New York vs. London: The 24 Hour Culture Crawl"
Peter Goddard, feature in the Toronto Star ("Exhibit a Boatload of Trouble"), Aug. 12, 2007
CBC/Radio Canada radio interview, "les artes et les autres", Aug. '07, with Philippe Burnet
CBC/Radio Canada television interview, French Television Network with Luce Gauthier:
RichardWatts_LeTelejournalOntario200711261800
CBC coverage of installation in New York
For "Lock", The Works project in Edmonton:
City TV, July 2, 2008
CBC Mainstage presentation, June 25
Edmonton Journal, Gilbert Bouchard, "Works Artist Doesn't Just Rock the Boat, He Builds It". June 25, July 1 2008.
For "Peterborough Lakeside", Peterborough Ontario
CHEX TV, Peterborough Examiner, Facebook, others.
For other shows, small catalogues, regional paper reviews.
Work in public and private collections, including video work with Christo and Jeanne-Claude.
