With the energy of an incandescent sun, sculptor Kenn Speiser’s Providence studio blasts one’s senses with color and doesn’t let go. From the six-foot high “highway art” in the foyer – dominated by the friendly icon “Can Man” – to a startling canvas called “Thumb Thing Else” that’s basically Speiser’s thumb print in chenille, it’s obvious Speiser is a man who lives, breathes, and thrives on his work.
Every day Speiser and his wife, photographer Constance Brown, wake up and depart for their separate corners in their three-story victorian, the couple’s Standard Poodle Keeshia, black as ink, free to pad back and forth between parents. “I go down to work, she goes up to work,” Speiser said cheerfully of his wife, and as he offered freshly made tea.
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He’s got two exhibits going on right now – one a “Garden Cone Project” of cast concrete traffic cone replicas installed at the Mount Hope Farm in Bristol (for the Newport Showcase exhibit) that further documents Speiser’s fascination with road construction iconography.
The second is a two-month long show that began last week at the Bert Gallery in Providence, entitled “Artifacts From The Information Age,” a series of new works created by Speiser over the last year that takes the familiar concept of “found object” art several imaginative steps further.
In this exhibit Speiser uses floppy disks and video tape to build wall and free standing sculptures to illuminate both the beauty and fragility of computer artifacts and other disposable information age products.
Some see an obsolete floppy and chuck it in the trash – Speiser, with his inimitable brand of “X-ray vision,” sees a potential gold mine, the raw material for a captivating and colorful array of sculpture, once it’s inspected, dissected and reconstructed by his loving and meticulous hands.
Take the lovely wall sculpture made by pushing floppy disks into painted wooden blocks. “Just a simple amount of pressure turns a round disk into a flower,” Speiser said. “I shuck ’em like clams.”
From whence does his visionary juices come? Speiser surely doesn’t know, and that’s part of what’s so exciting and interesting. “Everything’s connected,” Speiser said, remembering seeing highway workers on a trip to Santa Fe and how the synchronicity of their waving flags resembled kachina dolls, or “road construction versions of these little Navaho spirits.”
It’s this taking of one thing and turning it into something else that’s what turns Speiser the artist on. Take the three-foot high, undulating and as yet unnamed piece that dominates one studio table, a kinetic, shimmering flow of audio tape dangling freely from the top of a rod.
It’s the same stuff inside your basic Jethro Tull cassette, only most people don’t care about it unless it gets jammed, Speiser said, then they fling it out their car windows and let it die along the roadway. “Most people never take the time to see” what’s inside, he continued, but it’s the subterranean and inner level where the most magic flows.
“I’m responding to the material aspect of an audio cassette rather than its function,” Speiser said, demonstrating how different an artwork looks, and feels, depending on where one stands. “It’s kind of like the parts are more important than the whole.”
Seen his way the stuff truly is lovely and provocative, and that’s what part of what gallery owner Catherine Bert enjoys so much about Speiser’s work – the other part is his commitment. “What I love about Kenn’s work is the precision,” Bert said, adding that it’s also his special, conceptual sophistication and most of all humor that makes his work to appealing to audiences.
”It’s how the materials change, based on how we experience it, that’s my fascination,” Speiser said. “And then it becomes spectacular” – the same way the plastic shopping bag in the film “American Beauty” became a spiritual symbol because of the way it whirled and flowed in the wind.
Originally from Queens, Speiser grew up on Long Island, and graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1968. He also taught at RISD for a few years, falling in love with Providence, its easy access to art galleries and supply stores, its ability to separate him from the past. It’s the urban part of the Ocean State that works for Speiser. “I’m more internal. Cities are actually better for me.”
Speiser’s work has been shown from Wickford to New York City to Vero Beach, and is now represented in 20 collections, from Fidelity Investments and Prudential Insurance in Boston to the University of Rhode Island School of Oceanography to Hasbro Children’s Hospital and Wilcox Park in Westerly.
For Pagano Schenck and Kay Advertising he found his material by “dumpster diving” behind the Dexter Shoe factory in Maine, and he’s made sculptures out of garden hose for Teknor Apex Co. in Pawtucket. For GTECH Speiser made a huge work out of lottery terminal pieces, and for the R.I. Resources Recovery Corporation he fashioned a piece from trashed refrigerators, “which I then filled with stuff from the dump.”
An aspect of the Bert Gallery show he’s particularly proud of is a series of nine black drawings done in black gouache wash. Indicating one, Speiser steps back as visitors guess what they could be. A table? An old-fashioned typewriter, a washing machine, a TV set?
With the grin of a child he reveals they are actually enlarged views of protection buttons used to lock files onto a floppy. “I’ve found about 35 or more different style varieties,” he said, a process aided by tweezers and a magnifying glass, and the dedicated perusal qualities of an entomologist.
The free-standing sculpture “Your Eyes” is based on 800 floppies suspended across 10 cylinders. Another luminous wall sculpture is a collection of silver slides, each inscribed with a different company logo that was part of a throwaway pile from creating “Your Eyes.”
“I was able to find almost 100 different slides,” Speiser said excitedly, refusing to speculate too far on what the pieces are actually made of, for it would take away the fun. “I want to have the aura and the first-time excitement that a kid would have.”
Despite the extreme labor intensity of his work, the hardest part Speiser’s art is the increasing sense of an escalation into obsolescence. “I feel like I’m desperately reaching and grabbing for all this stuff that is no longer used,” Speiser said, standing before a framed piece that’s basically the anatomy of a diskette. “The most flattering thing people say to me, ‘God, I never even knew it was there.'”
The Bert Gallery is located at 540 South Water St. in Providence. Gallery hours are Monday to Friday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday, noon to 4 p.m. Speiser’s work will be on display through Friday, Oct. 27. An opening reception will be held Thursday from 6 to 8 p.m. For more information, call 751-2628.
