back
to top
Frank
Turek's
Boxed Assemblages
For the past fifteen years I've been working exclusively in the medium
of assemblage. Originally, I was inspired by late 19th century optical
devices such as kinetiscopes, heliotropes, dioramas and peep shows. These
are generally considered pre-cinema devices in their relation to the development
of the movies, but for me they became a method of physically bringing
the viewer in close. A way to capture the viewers' gaze and attention
by forcing them to come up to within inches of a piece in order to get
the full effect of a piece. And so, my earliest attempts were viewing
boxes lit internally to allow the viewer a peepshow view of the contents.
A devoted interest in the dada and surrealists' use of collage and "found"
objects gave me the ideas for the contents of these boxes. Originally
I used book and magazine texts and illustrations as well as small pieces
of trash found in the street. I then began collecting vintage books and
magazines, game pieces, and a variety of old and worn odds and ends from
flea markets which provided me an accumulation of source material. With
these acquisitions my work started to develop a more open "shadow
box" format where I often used cigar boxes and desk drawers as the
containers of these assemblages. Parallel to the development of my artwork
was the blossoming of my own philosophic thought. I was studying the modern
hermeneutic thought of Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer, who felt that
language was the essence of our being and through a better understanding
of our relation to language we can better understand ourselves. What most
intrigued me about their thought was that they emphasized that poetry
rather than analytic discourse held the truths about language. Relating
this to my visual art I found that I could use the misplaced and forgotten
pieces of our material culture as a visual poetry to comment upon our
own contemporary state of being. My assemblages provided me a method towards
a visual philosophy, or in Gadamer's terms a visual hermeneutics. A sense
of modern and postmodern philosophic thought has helped lead me to collage
as a basis for my assemblages. I use assorted objects in my work and each
has a power all its own, demanding the attention a central object deserves.
But the underpinning or backdrop to these objects, and my main focus,
is how the printed paper elements set up the themes and dialogue of a
piece. Most if not all of the surfaces of my boxed assemblages (inside
and out) are covered with collaged pages from vintage books and magazines,
maps and comics, etc. The oddness of past items for me becomes a useful
tool for commenting on the present day. It's removed enough so that we
can sometimes laugh at it, but we also recognize it as part of our collective
culture, so we listen to it with a certain reverence. Placing these images
and text in my assemblages where they can resonate off of each other creates
a kind of micro-theater full of humor, pathos and reflection.
