Jeffry ChiplisNew Ideas in Inert Gases

Jeffry ChiplisNew Ideas in Inert Gases

Jan 2–Feb 14, 2014 William Busta Gallery2731 Prospect AvenueCleveland OH 44115

W williambustagallery.comT 216.298.9071E bustagallery@gmail.com

Top:

CHAIRtable, 2014

argon, transformers, glass,

aluminum, plexiglass

32 in x 42 in. diameter

Middle left:

Beasts in Love, 2014

neon, argon, steel armature,

transformer; 32 x 45 x 6 in.

Middle right:

Shebeast Takes a New Lover,

2014

neon, argon, steel armature,

transformer; 28 x 41 x 6 in.

Right, and front cover:

CLEtable, 2014

argon, transformers, glass,

aluminum, plexiglass;

32 x 30 in. diameter

Back cover:

The Power of Deflection, 2014

argon, neon, steel armature,

transformer; 15 x 25 x 9 in.

Jeffry Chiplis’s glowing, oddly poetic sculptures, built from the sputtering limbs and letters of discarded neon signs, have a touch of mad science about them, and a certain living-for-the-city panache. For more than three decades Chiplis has rescued spare parts from salvage yards and secondhand shops to his Tremont studio, where he brings to bear the diverse aptitudes of scavenger, wit, poet, and visionary electrician. Over the years he has improvised a recombinant art form as rare as the noble gases that are his primary medium, repairing and reassembling “found” signage, frequently in abstract, heuristic configurations which reach toward multiple new formal roles and a deliberately unstable verbal significance. His works presently on view at William Busta in a solo show titled New Ideas in Inert Gases (as opposed to his exhibit at White Box in New York a few years back, Excited Inert Gases) are the latest essays in this ongoing enterprise. Each is an enigmatic example of the decay and recovery of meaning, and the crisscrossing ambiguities of language, symbol, form and function. There have been plenty of artists who work with neon and the other noble gases to achieve an unusual, light-infused take on sculpture, some of whom have had an impact on Chiplis—Francois Morellet, for instance, and the late Stephen Antonakos. But Chiplis is up to something quite different from these mainstream masters. He has a born Dadaist’s attraction to the inherent beauty and semiotic potential of fragmentary remains, things that time or economic vicissitudes have exiled from their original purpose. One impulse in Chiplis’s work is toward a new independence of a peculiar kind, in which the “meaning” of a commercial branding device is seen to break down associatively as it becomes more decorative— a snapshot of one stage in art’s conceptual journey. He’s interested in the play of semantic light and shadow as old messages disappear and twist toward new content. Beginning as beer advertisements or corporate logos, these finally become advertisements for themselves, gnomic half-jokes about the transparency of the ego that resemble consciousness falling into dream, slipping from one lost context toward another. His hotwired junk symbols flash a double-exposed identity that remembers a little and forgets everything, finally subsumed in the urgently present electrical discharges of argon and neon.

The exhibit at William Busta includes a group of seven works that might be thought of as found drawings, executed in various noble gases. They’re each about three-feet square, and whatever they may have been or said originally, they’re now abstract linear light sculptures, some of them with a caricature-like edge. Maybe the brightly lit central swoops in SheBeast Takes a New Lover and Beasts in Love resemble Snoopy’s nose or some other iconic, graphic

Jeffry Chiplis: This is Not a Sign

This page:

Bipolar House, 2014

argon, neon, transformer,

steel, plastic

32”h x 32”w x 5”d

Photography: Jerry Mann

funniness. And the bowing courtesy of that swoop in the second of these is strangely sweet, with its little box-like configuration flung wide as counterbalance, like a ukulele, or a mandolin; maybe the nose, the phallic organ, isn’t so much Snoopy as Cyrano, a proxy for the reality of desire. And in the other piece there’s a straight length of another fragment, jutting up like a cigarette in a long holder, emphasizing a certain nightclub-like, louche jouissance, bouncing in a tangle of light. Chiplis’s titles propose two dominate themes that seem to nail their inner spirit.

Two other recent sculptures here, shadowed as always by a nest of cords and connectors, are called CHAIRtable and CLEtable. Both are made from three-foot tall, metal clad glowing blue letters, which once spelled some corporate name but now are abandoned to an eternal, alphabetical amnesia in the aftermath of one of the city’s cycles of deconstruction. Arranging five of these letters, Chiplis spells the word “chair,” or “ha” or “air” (depending which letters are turned on) then crowns them with a round glass tabletop. “Ceci n’est pas une chaise,” you might say. Three more are arrayed as “CLE,” which of course would mean “key” to Rene Magritte, though to us it’s just home. But it’s better to leave a Chiplis work with plenty of room to be itself. The real message more likely has to do with hidden rifts and seismic shifts in contemporary thinking and seeing, which this artist sketches in his unique way as he tinkers with the tubes and wires, the veins and bones of commercial nights.

—Douglas Max Utter

Jeffry Chiplis

Born 1952, Indianapolis, IN

Lives in Cleveland, OH

agentofchaos.com/chiplis

Education

1976 BFA, Sculpture, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN

Professional Experience

1979– Board of Trustees, SPACES, Cleveland, OH

Present

Selected Solo Exhibitons

2013 The Great White Mountains + The Cold Cathode Plains, William Busta Gallery, Cleveland, OH

2011 In a Balance + New Work, ArtsCollinwood Cafe, Cleveland, OH

2010 Neon Works in the Twenty First Century, Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, OH

2008 Text as Art, Krasl Art Center, St. Joseph, MI

2006 Neon Sculpture, Parish Hall, Cleveland, OH

2005 It’s A Gas, The Sculpture Center, Cleveland, OH

2003 Excited Inert Gases, White Box Gallery, New York City, NY

Enchante’ Morellet, Superior, An Exhibition Space, Cleveland, OH

Neon Repoetry, ArtMetro Gallery, Cleveland, OH

2002 Neon, Argon, and More Neon, Asterisk Gallery, Tremont, OH

Selected Recent Group Exhibitions

2014 N19TEEN, Dana Depew Curator, REDspace, Cleveland, OH

Rooms to Let, Slavic Village, Cleveland, OH

Six in Studio, West 78th Street Studios, Cleveland, OH

2013 Rooms to Let, Columbus, OH

2010 I of the Text, Riffe Gallery, Columbus, OH

Clear Signs, Wall Eye Gallery, Cleveland, OH

2008 Arrangements of the City, Cuyahoga Community College, Metro Gallery, Cleveland, OH

Ingenuity Fest, Cleveland, OH

2007 Razzle Dazzle, ArtsCollinwood Gallery, Cleveland, OH

Apply Play–the SIN/FUN ideal, Waterloo Festival, Cleveland, OH

2006 Luminary Serenade, Cuyahoga Community College, Western Campus, Parma, OH

Collector’s Choice, Heights Arts, Cleveland Heights, OH

2005 The NEO Show, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH

2001–02 Celebration of the Spirit, Lake View Cemetery, Cleveland, OH

Honors and Awards

2014 Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts, Annual Logo Award

2013 Featured Artist, Scope Art Fair, New York, NY

2004 Artist in Residence, Dilna Art Symposium, Mikulov, Czech Republic

1985 Fellowship Award in Music Composition, Ohio Arts Council

Commissions

2013 The Great White Mountains, the All Argon Hills and the Cold Cathode Plains [Big World View Version], Ingenuity Fest, Cleveland, OH

Land, Lake, Sky, Cleveland Convention Center, OH

2012 Neon Bonfire: Let’s Roast Marshmallows, Ingenuity Fest, Cleveland, OH

ARTLAB, Krasl Art Center, St. Joseph, MI

2010 In a Balance, CollinwodArts Cafe, Cleveland, OH

2009 Ingenuity in Argon and Neon, Ingenuity Fest, Cleveland, OH

2007 Artificial Satellite Approaches a White Dwarf in an Irregular Orbit, Hahn Loeser + Parks LLP, Akron, OH

2006 Glass Graffiti, Civilization, Cleveland, OH

Selected Press

2010 Steven Litt, “Dark Act Doesn’t Define Bright Show,” Plain Dealer, June 27

2003 Michael Kimmelman, “Vallayer-Coster; Chiplis, Horowitz,” New York Times, January 31

2003 Thomas McEvilley, “Jeffry Chiplis’s Found Neon Art,” Art in America, February