Word Up

Roland Bernier takes everyday language and turns it into art

For Roland Bernier the word is the thing. Any word-- random words-- unrelated words that when put together have no meaning. Or do they? Just stop by his Walnut Street studio and you can see for yourself. Words are everywhere. They hang on the walls and form the shapes of crosses. Others in circles. They are cut out of plywood. They are cut out of mirrors. They are everywhere-- on the tables by the saws that Bernier uses to create. And they are stacked upon one another. Words upon words-- all in the name of art.

The 69-year-old Denver artist, whose latest exhibit Between The Lines runs from April 21 to August 12 at the Vance Kirkland Close Range Gallery at the Denver Art Museum, said people look for hidden messages and meanings in his art work all the time. But they just aren't there. That still doesn't stop people from looking. They are drawn to his pieces-- staring at the words-- looking for every distinct letter-- searching for the message, the hidden revelation. But there is no hidden message. Bernier says the message is in the form itself, not the individual words.

Bernier has been working with words to create his art since the early '60s when he was teaching art at the University of Huston and the Huston Museum of the Fine Arts.

"I started out using words and letters," Bernier said. "What I did was I started out just by painting. And eventually the words started coming into my work. Then I said 'let me just do words and see what happens. '"

Bernier is not an easy interview. He is constantly moving around his studio, showing his art as goes. He talks about his craft and the process of creation with the enthusiasm and vitality of a student fresh out art school. He will show you each individual letter and how it was made. He will tell you how wonderful his ideas are-- and he doesn't come off as egocentric. It is just who he is-- someone who is genuinely excited and passionate about what he does.

After Huston, Bernier went to New York in 1966 to ply his trade. He stayed there until the early '70s when he got tired of the scene and moved to Baltimore, leaving all his work behind.

"I filled up a couple dump trucks ... I started all over ... I traveled very light."

He came to Denver with his wife in 1972 where he taught art at the Park Avenue Center until he retired in 1990. For most of his time teaching, Bernier says he did not create anything.

"I was always involved with my wife and teaching. Then after about six years I started thinking about it. I'd go to an exhibit now and then and see what's going on. Then I decided to quit teaching. I think part of it was because my boss' husband was dying of cancer. He'd become so diminished-- his clothes would sag on him, and he would come by and pick up his wife-- I just said, 'My God, that could be me. ' So I wanted to get out of it and get to work."

While most people's image of an artist might be of the tortured soul waiting for the muse to visit, Bernier has a solid work ethic, getting to his studio early in the morning and working until late at night.

"I work every day. I come in here in the mornings and I'll work until 4:30. Then I'll go home and help my wife with supper then come back at 6 and work until 9 or 9:30. I used to work until 10:30 or 11 but my wife says she worries about me."

There is no method to how Bernier selects the words he will use in his work. In fact, he says that he just flips through the dictionary and dots the words that catch his eye.

For his series called Cross Words, Bernier took expressions such as 'star crossed' and 'cross corners' and created his piece around the expressions. The result was a cutting commentary on the religion of celebrity. At least that's one way to perceive it.

"You can make associations yourself," Bernier said, "because it will mean something different for everybody."

And for his piece in the show called Words of Wisdom, an eight-by-eight-foot wall relief, it was the very ideas themselves that formed the work of art.

"I kept a box of all the things that I wrote down. I put them on napkins, pieces of paper-- you name it, I kept them. So I Xeroxed them and used them in that piece and called it Words of Wisdom. I could keep doing that. I could do another piece when I save enough."

Words of Wisdom is an amazing piece that illustrates the process of creating-- years of writing thoughts down and doodling ideas. There are even names and phone numbers jotted down and placed throughout the work. And of course, there are words as well. You could lose yourself for an hour in this piece alone. But to truly appreciate what Bernier does you have to go see it for yourself. Words on the printed page can't do his work justice.

And people will indeed come to see it. Esther Ginsberg, a Los Angeles antique dealer and former student of Bernier's, flew in to be at the exhibit's opening. She said that what Bernier did and how he taught left a lasting impression on her.

"He changed the whole direction of my life," Ginsberg said, adding that having Bernier for a teacher was more than just going to class and learning how to paint. "It was a way of thinking and conceptualizing," she said.

And for the person who has never seen the inside of an art gallery, Bernier says he would like the experience to be a welcome and refreshing one.

"I think for sure they're going to say, 'This guy is really giving us something different. ' And they have to start informing themselves about art and the historical consequences of art and how it's evolved to where it is today. Art has an evolution just like everything else does. Some artists feel that art is a dead issue. At least conceptual art. Basically you're doing a variation of a theme. [But] I don't feel that way because I feel I'm in a place and I've got a form that I'm working with that nobody's ever done before. And I'm doing it in different ways-- I'm not just doing it one way-- I'm doing it in several different ways. And the way I change that is by changing the form itself."

--Matthew Davis

photo by Sean Weaver

SKIN DEEP
@
IRONTON STUDIOS & GALLERY

3636 Chestnut St.

Ironton Studios & Gallery has just announced it will be keeping its current exhibit up through the end of April, and possibly into May. Those who haven't yet made the trek up to 3636 Chestnut Street can still see Andy Miller's new sculpture and Debra Goldman's mapping series. Although, according to Goldman, the two artists went into the show unaware of each other's work, their pieces combine thematically around the role of human beings in the natural world.

Miller's four pieces of sculpture all combine permanent materials with bits of skin and hair from farm animals. The resulting work, which is highly formal, plays with the mind and evokes sharp considerations of flesh, the body, and humans' relation to other animals.

This is particularly true where Miller uses salted, dried pigskin, which resembles nothing so much as slightly sunburned Caucasian skin, little blonde hairs and all. Pig Nipples with Neon, with its array of little globes of rosy pink skin on a black board under a deep blue light, gently mocks the "peach" imagery often associated with human breasts. But it does not mock either human breasts or the nipples of pigs: the globes seem achingly vulnerable. Some of the nipples sport a dusting of white powder. One seems to have a blister. It is impossible to ignore that they once lived, but rather than being grisly, they command respect.

The skin comes from animals that were already slaughtered for food. "I used the pig skin first of all because the texture is so humanlike," Miller said. "Pigs are considered filthy, and a dirty animal-- and I think that's what attracted me, rather than more glamorous animals... I'm curious about people's relationship with barnyard animals, which we feel are so filthy but which we are so connected to, through our diet, even through our economy."

His other two sculptures using pigskin, Bathroom People and Skin with Marble, incorporate the material more subtly, as part of arresting forms. Bathroom People consists of a pair of massive steel figures of the universal icons for male and female restrooms. Black and mottled, they humorously drip a small amount of their finishing oil onto the floor. The pair is randomly dotted with globes of pigskin, reminding the viewer these giant signs reflect an animal need. At a distance, though, they add another color and texture, providing relief from the simplicity of the forms. "Skin with Marble," perhaps the most architectural of the pieces, sets keels of hairy skin into a smooth cube of white marble, which rises from a stacked steel column.

The four steel bars of the fourth piece, Hair with Steel, curve out of the wall along two different trajectories. Each is tipped with brown sheep hair. The piece, while as successful as the others, feels happily whimsical.

On the surface, Debra Goldman's series of silver gelatin photographs, mapping, could not be more different from Miller's work. Yet by exploring the self through text, dark spaces, and simple imagery, her photographs encounter the natural world and the frailty of life.

This makes sense, given that the actual subject matter of the photographs are jellyfish from the Ocean Journey aquarium. Goldman photographed the jellyfish on different occasions for about a year, inspired by their almost formless form, she said. The pictures, which look like they are negatives with their white images on a dark background, are actually positives that she folded and unfolded, like maps. Many of the series of 40 photographs also sport further manipulation-- text, sewing, a burn mark, etc.

Goldman was moved by a personal narrative to create the series, she said: "I went back to my journals from three years ago, when I had a baby, and everything changed. My father died then, too ... it was an important time."

The map, according to Goldman, becomes a metaphor in the photographs for memory, which like the map can become worn and folded. "I've always been fascinated by actual maps," she said. "They create ideas of boundary and ownership."

The landscape created by this map often feels lonely, but not lonesome-- solitary and transcendently aware.

Through the divisions and subdivisions created by the different photos and their folds, rooms are created in the work's space. These rooms are reflected in a piece of text found in many of the pieces, by Zen Buddhist author Robert Aitken in his Verses for Environmental Practice: "Looking up at the sky I vow with all beings to remember this infinite ceiling in every room of my life."

Such text connects the astral/ undersea images of the jellyfish to the self, and back out again. There is a great deal of space even in small corners of the images, and the whole feels intricately deep through the repetition of the jellyfish, the folds, and the text. It's hard to imagine separating the different photos in the series: they work together.

--Kate Williamson