Kathleen King & Jo Ann Biagini
1228 30th St, Oakland
December 7 & 8, 2024
I like readymade art. If it’s done well and thoughtfully, objects placed in space just-so, these intentional arrangements tweak something in my brain. They ping my aesthetic antennae and perk up my visual ears to the silent story the pieces tell.
Think Pablo Picasso’s 1942 bicycle seat-and-handlebars creation “Tete de Taureau (Bull's Head),” or Jeff Koons’s 1980s “The New Series,” where vacuum cleaners are displayed like precious artifacts in plexiglass light boxes. Or the most famous readymade of them all, Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 “Fountain,” a porcelain urinal signed “R. Mutt.”
How does one make what’s already present newly present?
When I walked into Kathleen King’s large industrial West Oakland space during East Bay Open Studios, my eyes were immediately drawn to a piece entitled “Conversation” (pictured at top): two wooden chairs facing each other, a collection of wood scraps laying across and between the two seats. It was engaging in its simplicity, straightforward, and it wasn’t until days later that I realized that the work had in fact evoked the memory of a Joseph Beuys exhibit I’d seen in New York many years ago.
“Conversation” was one of several readymade pieces King had on display, and while I did not find all to be as successfully executed as “Conversation,” they were certainly thoughtful.
An arrangement of buckets, bowls, and a jar sit atop a rectangle of plywood resting on two cardboard boxes, “Womb” was another piece I lingered at. I liked the utterly unremarkable and ordinary grouping of the chosen objects, although in this case one fewer might have been better.
King states that the “open containers project desire and loss simultaneously…a container inside women’s bodies and the labor of reproducing life.” That’s not what I took from the piece; to me they’re just an arrangement of things whose beauty lies in their prosaic commonplaceness. The inherent “object-ness” is foremost in my mind, but the piece is interesting regardless of interpretation, which I believe speaks to its magnetism.
King’s “Strong Ties 10,” though not a readymade, also drew me in. It is a fairly large color field and sculpture in one. Part of a series of painted wood assemblages made from scrap wood and house paint, I loved its almost off-putting muddy ochre color and rough, unfussy geometric composition, the boldly visible screw-heads used for assembly.
King’s studio mate, Jo Ann Biagini, creates works that are less conceptual and beautiful in their own right. Using Rives BFK (Blanchet Frères & Kiebler, a classic and heavyweight printmaking paper) as a base, Biagini takes images from old photography and textbooks, covers them with gel medium and then smooths them down with a tiny roller, over and over again until the pages are made rough and organic-looking. The images become faded, no longer resembling their originals. Biagini will often also make laser copies of particular images then transfer them back to the roller-roughened paper with a matte medium.
Biagini demonstrated this rolling technique for me—she spent the open studio time working on pieces rather than sit idly. It looked exhausting. She uses a small roller in order to achieve the desired effects, and some of her pieces are quite large. But she obviously knows what she wants out of the materials how to get there—although she did tell me that part of what she likes about creating is the element of surprise.
The end result of all this physical effort is wonderful. The complicated colors Biagini creates in her processes are deeply layered and labyrinthine, nearly illimitable. It was difficult to take in all the works she had exhibited. My eyes were all over the place.
The dissimilarities between King and Biagini’s work and their processes were a welcome contrast. And yet, they both begin their art with leftovers—discarded pieces of unremarkable everyday items remade into extraordinary things.
Betty Friedman and Jamie Morgan also exhibited at 1228 30th Street for East Bay Open Studios.
