John Randall Nelson: Short-Lived
Bentley Projects, Phoenix

Walking through Bentley Projects’ many rooms towards the cavernous center
Is like touring a museum of New Millennium Phoenix. The red brick walls and patchwork concrete floors of the once-warehouse cascade in an ambience of industrial patinas to the vaulted peaks, where clerestory windows brush the massive wooden trusses with pale light. Nothing is more up to date than anachronism. The building tells a story of past and future optimism in the city. Another story is being told by John Randall Nelson’s new collection “Short-Lived,” on display in the center gallery through May.

Accompanying the exhibit is a video, “The Seven Ages of Man,” based loosely on William Shakespeare’s “All the world is a stage” soliloquy, with verse by Eric Susser and animated illustration by Nelson.

The video is not an aside to the exhibit, but a key--perhaps a summation. With the words “life is like a play, the acts being exactly seven,” childhood, then youthful lust is remembered; then young parenthood; and then the age of “weddings and funerals.” Being a child is revisited on the death of a parent, accompanied by much regret over “the many things done wrong, the few things done right.” Finally, the second childhood of old age is glimpsed as the death ofsensuality before the dry shell crumbles. Actually it’s a very cheerful little film. Perhaps there is something happy about knowing you are definitely on to the game.

Happy/Sad flows through the rest of the exhibition in an outpouring of paintings, drawings and sculptures. The works rejoice in materiality. Surfaces are thick with densely saturated pigments and heavily worked with layers of drawing. Sides and backs of paintings are varnished, giving everything in the room a sculptural quality. These are objects, part of the sensual world. Even the drawings have dimension, with the paper lifting off its backing, surrounded by heavy, idiosyncratic frames.

In the back of the room, sitting on file cases amidst the bric-a-brac of gallery maintenance are seven small paintings or drawings, innocuous enough. Starting with seven prose poems written by Susser that became the basis for the verse in the video, Nelson responded with his seven. They depict very simple objects - flower, hat, or other such. Always only one object, and framed as if they were examples of letters in an alphabet. In the film, some of these are repeated as line drawings that twitch like a jumping jack. In the big room the same motifs are imbedded in the thickly worked paintings, or stand tall as monster polychrome carvings. One begins to suspect that the film is not the key, but just one story of many. The key to this Happy/Sad world is not hidden in some arcane code, but staring at us as simple as simple be.

Something else is peculiar in this exhibition. Though the individual paintings and sculptures certainly exercise their duty to be precious objects that would, if we gave them a chance, induce us to buy them--there is something up. The palette of the show is well crafted- reds, grays, blacks- like a Roman fresco or Civil War uniform. It is here that one starts to wonder, are these motifs all over the rooms symbols like ideograms, or are they symbols like letters? If they are like ideograms, are they like soldiers, and if so, which ones are expendable? Is this a collection of artwork to buy, or is this some sort of assemblage? If I buy a painting- is it kidnapping? If they are letters, and I take one, will the words be broken?

It must be the clustering of small drawings next to the curtain that is in front of the the video room that can explain it all. On the other side of the room are large wooden sculptures, oversized puppets on little wheeled trolleys ready to roll away. In between, a line of paintings on yet another wall in this room that has
the same colors as the paintings, etc. It’s as if the building did not hold the exhibit like the setting of a jewel, like the frame of a painting, like a box of chocolates, like an art gallery holds art. The building is part of the exhibit perhaps, or
maybe it’s the reverse, and running around from wall to wall, from letter to letter or whatever these are, only someone here for a very short time indeed.

-Scott Andrews

John Randall Nelson: Short-Lived
April-May 2007
Bentley Projects
215 E Grant Street
Phoenix, AZ 85004

Tel.: (602) 340-9200
Web: bentleyprojects.com
Artist’s website: whonelson.com