Art in a 'self-contained world'

By David Carkhuff Staff writer david@portlanddailysun.me

It's amazing how far you can see in a space the size of a shoebox.

That's the guiding principle of Frank Turek, a Portland artist who, in a world of big spectacles, relishes the intimacy of a shadow box.

Delving into the past is what inspired this Portland artist to specialize in boxed assemblages, more commonly known as shadow boxes. Boxed assemblages are intricate miniature worlds created in drawers, books, shoeboxes and other receptacles. The viewer can gaze through an aperture into a three-dimensional world where collaged pages from vintage books and magazines, maps and comics are interwoven with game pieces and other "old odds and ends" to create a tableau.

In the age of "Avatar," some might call this kind of art a curious throwback to a time before movies and television.

Turek said he sees the boxed assemblage as a communicator of modern themes through a medium that, he concedes, dates to the Victorian Era.

"A lot of my inspirations come from just commenting on contemporary culture using the artifacts of our culture," he said.

How can a boxed assemblage compete with startling innovations in movies, such as the groundbreaking computer effects of a blockbuster film?

Turek said motion pictures emerged from the precinema peep show, an early version of the shadow box. Today, after building about 200 boxed assemblages, Turek said he relishes the idea of visiting a miniature place where imagination and ideas, not big-screen spectacle, rule the day.

"There's all kinds of reactions; the people that respond to it the most respond to the interplay of the images, it creates these mysterious worlds," he said.

"My work and films have the same kind of fundamental root," he explained. "In the Victorian Era, there was an interest in the way that visual things could be entertainment, like the early stereopticons, the lens with two photos."

Known in its modern form as the Viewmaster, the stereopticon is a slide projector or "magic lantern" featuring layered still images.

Turek said he has been building boxed assemblages since around 1990 when he was a University of Southern Maine student.

"I started in my last year of school, I went to USM, and my last year at school I got an interest in turn-of-the-century peep shows and different optical toys that were around in the Victorian Era," he explained. "I liked the idea of going up really close to actually look at something rather than traditional art, like painting, where you step back and look at it. There is a whole other dynamic, it sort of creates this whole world in your imagination when you step up and there's nothing else to block it out."

Turek said he works poetically, using images that challenge the viewer the way a poem's literary images might challenge a reader.

In "Theogony," for example, a diorama of elephants rearing up near a set of columns explores symbolically a culture's hierarchy of gods.

"This piece is about the hierarchy of the way we think about mythology," Turek said.

"Snow Job" features clown stamps placed strategically on dated nudie pictures. Censorship is a theme of this piece, although Turek doesn't want to limit his work to a literal message.

"Because the images are poetic, it's hard to explain them because it's like when you explain poetry, you're not really getting at the kernel of it," he said.

The use of tastefully anachronistic nudie pictures is, in itself, a sly allusion to the public perception of the early shadow boxes -- the "peep shows."

"The majority of the early peep shows were just very basic things, action pictures, that was before movies," Turek explained. "Everything that would be the subject of a movie would be the subject of a peep show, but there is that cultural connotation that it's something risque."

Clowns emerge as a theme elsewhere in Turek's artistic life. Arriving in Portland in 1984, Turek hosted several radio programs at the University of Southern Maine radio station WMPG, where he introduced listeners to experimental sounds and musical techniques, according to a biographical sketch on his website (www.ubustudio.com). Later, from 1987-1996, he explored easy listening music of the 1950s and 1960s with the radio program, My Vinyl Recliner. Playing saxophone, Turek went on to form the Portland rock band, Shutdown 66, and the band's flyers gained notoriety for Turek's use of collage, the layering and gluing of clippings.

"After Shutdown 66 disbanded, Turek along with the band's drummer Mike Dank, created the visionary novelty band The Clown School Dropouts. Mixing the styles of 1930s novelty jazz with klezmer and circus music motifs, this duo of 'avant-schmaltz' music played regularly from 1999 through 2004 in venues ranging rock clubs to art galleries," Turek's biography states.

In his college days, while delving into avant-garde music, Turek incorporated the art of collage into his exploration of boxed assemblages.

"I started making prototype boxes that were peep shows, and I also at that time had been dabbling in collage, and with those boxes, it became a real central element," he recalled.

Dada artists in the 1920s and 1930s who used collage elements  in their art inspired him, Turek said.

In 2000, what was then a "relatively new venue for new artistic ideas," the West End restaurant Local 188, showed Turek's art. In 2004, he found an old locksmith shop on Congress Street and converted it into a studio. In October of 2006, ubu studio ceased to be a gallery, but Turek moved his artistic endeavors to 142 High St., Suite 323, where he is today.

The time taken to create a boxed assemblage varies wildly, Turek said. He built one in a week by working on it constantly. Typically he spends a month to a month and a half on a creation. Other ideas linger and take time to come to fruition.

"One I just finished recently I started around 1997 and I just finished it," he noted.

Turek has returned to building assemblages inside books. 

"The fun thing about these is they can have little interactive parts," he said, referring to removable drawers and niches in the hollowed-out books.

As his latest project, Turek said, he is trying to adapt a poetic form such as a sonnet and recreate it visually in the visual characteristics of a boxed assemblage.

The scale of a boxed assemblage is dictated by the size of his ideas, Turek said.

"It's kind of like the difference between working on a short story and writing a novel," he said.

All these years later, the shadow box may have been overtaken by cinema in popular culture. Still, Turek continues to resort to an art form that physically brings the viewer in close.

"To me it engages the imagination more when you block out the rest of the world and when you look into this self-contained world," he said.

INSETS

The art of Frank Turek

From Feb 23 through March 6, Frank Turek plans an exhibit in conjunction with the annual Xfest improvised music festival at 119 Gallery, 119 Chelmsford St., Lowell, Mass. For more info, visit www.119gallery.org. For more about Turek's boxed assemblages, visit www.ubustudio.com.

 Collage exhibition

On view through Feb. 28, the Portland Museum of Art is exploring the world of collages in the exhibition, "Collage: Piecing It Together." Featuring approximately 25 works from the museum’s collection and selected loans from contemporary Maine artists, this exhibition explores the history of collage from its introduction in Europe in the early 20th century by artists such as Kurt Schwitters and Jean Arp to present-day works by Maine artists such as Tom Hall and Aaron Stephan. The exhibition also covers a wide range of collage techniques, including abstract works pieced together from newsprint and colored papers, collaged elements incorporated into drawings and prints, paintings that include collaged figurative elements, and photomontages. The Portland Museum of Art is open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday, and 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Friday.