Ejecta. Dickinson Scholar. Dickinson College. Anthony Cervino Dickinson College. Shannon Egan

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1 Dickinson College Dickinson Scholar Faculty and Staff Publications By Year Faculty and Staff Publications 2015 Ejecta Anthony Cervino Dickinson College Shannon Egan Follow this and additional works at: Part of the American Art and Architecture Commons, Contemporary Art Commons, and the Sculpture Commons Recommended Citation Cervino, Anthony and Shannon Egan. Ejecta. [Carlisle, PA]: Anthony Cervino and Shannon Egan, This article is brought to you for free and open access by Dickinson Scholar. It has been accepted for inclusion by an authorized administrator. For more information, please contact

2 EJECTA Anthony Cervino and Shannon Egan

3 First published 2015 Copyright Anthony Cervino and Shannon Egan 2015 All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any other means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright holders. Design by Ayumi Yasuda This book is printed on the occasion of the exhibition Ejecta in CulturalDC s Flashpoint Gallery, Washington, DC, August 14 September 12, 2015.

4 TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1. EJECTA 1 CHAPTER 2. EJECTA-LOGUE 11 CHAPTER 3. BETTER HALF: FOLIE À DEUX AND ARCHIMORPH (DUPLEX) 23 CHAPTER 4. AN EXCHANGE, PART I 35 CHAPTER 5. NOBODY S PERFECT: WORLD S BEST 41 CHAPTER 6. THE FABLE OF KUNTRY MOUSE 51 CHAPTER 7. A PRODIGAL SON: AT ONCE WAS I 59 CHAPTER 8. AN EXCHANGE, PART II 73 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 91

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6 CHAPTER ONE EJECTA

7 The Ejecta (detail) wood, linen, glass, found and made objects " x 48" x 36"

8 EJECTA In volcanology and geology the ejecta is the matter thrown from the explosive events surrounding volcanic eruptions or meteor impacts. This term, taken for the title of the multi-part installation (The Ejecta) and for the exhibition as a whole (Ejecta), is also an apt metaphor for an active studio practice. During process-driven creative investigations, the collateral art often is as revealing and significant as the object of determined making. This private and isolated nature of artmaking also can be understood as a metaphorically masturbatory act; the affinity of Ejecta with ejaculation is not

9 accidental. The exhibition began with the thought of how the self-pleasing process of creating is brought into fraught balance with others desires, expectations, and commendation. In considering this concern about external recognition and conventional notions of success, Anthony Cervino and I were also drawn to how Ejecta implies the word reject, the antithesis of accomplishment. This project, in one incarnation, was intended to posture fame and prosperity and to mediate between self-perceived mediocrity and evidence of sincere effort. As conversation and collaboration evolved over the past two years, an innate earnestness took hold to anchor the exhibition and book in our shared sense of morality, ambition, vulnerability, and affection. Cannibalization of older sculptures to make new art is a regular practice in Cervino s studio. Some of the works in Ejecta have already been well-digested, but, this process has not been about displaying failures or trying to recoup losses. All of the objects are the results of rigorous editing and extensive labor. As curator of this exhibition, I have the challenge of not considering Ejecta as a retrospective, as an archive, nor simply as an artist s body of recent work. The interconnected project (both the installation and this book) results from a considered and perhaps impossible attempt to put in context aspects of my husband s identity 4

10 5 (as husband, father, artist, teacher), as made and understood by him, but curated by or filtered through me. Together, we did not select objects according to a theme or coherent narrative, but the exhibited sculptures were made, remade, and considered anew to reflect a collaborative act, a temporal complexity, and a discursive approach to self-portraiture. Until now, we never have shared so determinedly the processes of writing and making. Because of the reflective and personal nature of the exhibition, it reveals a tangled timeline of art-historical citations, more private experiences, and works from Cervino s nearly twenty-year-long career. Of course, the exhibition and this book reflect us, as husband and wife, father and mother to our two children, artist and art historian, but the allusions rarely are so discreetly individual that other influences and intersections can t be discerned. For example, Cervino s longtime references to toys, boyhood play, and model kit parts in his oeuvre (since 2001 and seen here) finds a sort of parentage in artistic fathers Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, Chris Burden, Joseph Beuys, and Tom Sachs (the latter perhaps more like an enviable older brother than father ) who model a successful straddling of formal concerns with resonant subject matter. Like these predecessors, Cervino s relationship to objects is neither solely abstract nor overtly sentimental. But,

11 fatherhood is indeed personal, as he examines his own identity as a parent and his relationship to his own father, who is figured obliquely (and absently) in the form of his desk in Folie à deux. The reconfigured works in this exhibition are culled from specific moments in Cervino s career. At Once Was I ( ), for example, was first exhibited in the Flashpoint Gallery in It is now displayed in the crate in which it has been stored for the past seven years. Echoing this cratecum-frame, the long line of cases through the center of the gallery (collectively titled The Ejecta) look like seemingly utilitarian plywood crates from the outside. But, these glass-topped boxes are lined beautifully in linen and are evocative of museum display in an approximation of art-world success. They take Joseph Beuys vitrines as their inspiration, as Cervino s cases contain both found and made objects of personal significance, are arranged with great attention to spatial rhythms, and paradoxically connote both relics and waste. In one of these crate-cases, Cervino again elusively depicts his relationship with his father. As a boy, Cervino s father started to read the Hardy Boys book The Secret of Skull Mountain to him, but never finished the story. Over the past year, Cervino collected over a dozen copies of this volume, then spread them in a single row and layered wooden shims between each book. 6

12 7 Cervino cast a single, solid bronze copy to anchor the splayed stack; its carefully applied patina mimics and abstracts the color of its readymade, mass-reproduced, and worn referent. The display of these books with shims that look like arrows shot en masse, under an authoritatively heavy and relatively precious bronze weight, and protected by a glass lid like Snow White s coffin suggest a defensive posturing and roughly allude to the thrills promised by the book s cover. The bronze book and careful stacking partially obscure the cover illustration, but Joe Hardy, one of the book s protagonists, still can be seen holding a human skull in one hand and protecting himself from a falling rock with the other arm. Here, Joe stands in as an idealized surrogate for Cervino himself; he evokes a boyhood longing for adventure and is rewarded with a heroic, satisfying conclusion. Cervino s story, in contrast, started with a father s forgetfulness or neglect and ended with eventual estrangement. Rather than simply illustrating the climax of this Hardy Boys narrative, the depiction of a figure holding a skull evokes a familiar motif in the history of art and signifies a weightier contemplation of the transience of life. Taken as a potent symbol for Cervino, this book embodies and also wards against the passage of time and a father s deliberate absence.

13 Each case in The Ejecta is arranged with different compositional cadences and narrative evocations. In one, a green, compressed-oxygen tank appears to lie in state alongside a yellow, powder-coated, life-size steel light saber and denotes a fallen warrior. It should be noted that the color and shape of the light saber specifically emulates the one held by the toy action-figure of Luke Skywalker (c. 1978), not the real light saber of the popular Star Wars films. Another display with a matte black-painted slide carousel (one part of an older sculpture by Cervino), along with other objects including a black-painted pipe and a found women s urinal, offers a formal engagement with light and dark, volume and void, shape and line, as well as a subtle nod to Duchampian humor and the readymade. The tableaux conform to the conventions of museum display, like natural history specimens or historical artifacts. Moreover, they don t resonate merely as souvenirs with specific ties to personal memories. The logic of Cervino s iconography is bound first to interests in form, and second to a kind of auratic presence, a sense that the sculptures hold an elusively indexical relationship to a person, an experience, or more generally, to the past. 8

14 9 The structure of this book reflects the purposeful eclecticism of the overall installation. Three of the essays that follow specifically examine sculpture included in the exhibition and attempt to decode their ambiguities. Other chapters, An Exchange, Parts I and II, demonstrate the intensely personal nature of this collaboration and its intersection with our professional identities. Cervino s Fable of Kuntry Mouse provides a tongue-in-cheek morality tale, and a photoessay conveys the materiality and methods of his studio practice. This book is not intended to be a straightforward exhibition catalogue (a record of the gallery installation), nor does it provide any linear narrative. Rather, it is curatorial and confessional, a complement to the diverse components of Ejecta.

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16 CHAPTER TWO THE EJECTA-LOGUE

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28 CHAPTER THREE BETTER HALF: FOLIE À DEUX AND ARCHIMORPH (DUPLEX)

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30 BETTER HALF: FOLIE À DEUX AND ARCHIMORPH (DUPLEX) We each recently inherited desks belonging to our parents. Anthony s father used a relatively modest, plain wooden desk with squared legs and a rounded-back chair through optometry school. The other, a mid-century wooden desk painted black with tapered legs and brass pulls, was my mother s in high school. Both figures are long absent from our lives. He has been estranged from his father for over 20 years, and my mother died in an automobile accident in The desks, now shown as a sculpture titled Folie à deux, are pushed into and on top of the other and illustrate the

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33 parallelism of our shared loss of these influential, ever-present ghosts. The title, borrowed from a psychiatric term to describe a shared psychotic disorder of close couples (parents and offspring, siblings, or most frequently, spouses), translates to a madness shared by two. We do not seek such a rare clinical diagnosis, but our long-term marriage, our relative introversion, and our correlative grief evinces aspects of this kind of complicated and concentrated intimacy. We have imagined our parents sitting at these desks, but here, the overlapping of one desk over the other dispels the personal preciousness, the historical singularity, or even the mundaneness of each object. In creating a singular, but hybrid form, the parallel binaries of the desks and their absent referents immediately offered us a sense of equity, a sympathy of feeling and understanding that exemplifies the intended collaboration of Ejecta. The sliding together of the desks gives us remarkable satisfaction. The fit of one within the other was effortless, as the legs cross over the others almost flirtatiously and suggestively. One shelters the other; the other penetrates the one. Taken together, the desks evoke both mother/ father (them) as well as wife/husband (us). Of course, we don t picture our parents involved in this sort of coitus; it would be a perversion of the primal scene that we have no rational desire to envisage. Rather, this intersection of the two PREVIOUS PAGE Folie à deux our parents desks 2015 var. dimensions 28

34 29 desks becomes instead a portrait of us, seen in the shadow of the dented, old furniture. The roundedness of the father s chair contrasts with the straight lines of the mother s cushioned, flowery seat, but finds its formal echo with the mother s spherical drawer pulls. As the rectangular chair inches as close as possible to its arched counterpart, the play of curves and squares subtly challenge the gendered association of line and form. Here, femininity does not simply equate to curvilinearity, and masculinity is embedded in domesticity. Through the serendipitous positioning of the drawers on opposite sides, the desks mirror each other and are anchored as a singular object. Reconfigured expressly as sculpture, the desks no longer assume a household or functional objective. Neither are they historical nor beautiful enough to be considered or preserved as artifacts. We don t know when or where they were bought, but they are ours now. Although it is not uncommon to have one s parents effects (furniture, books, photographs, etc.) for purposes of sentimentality or practicality or both, the desks subtly sexual and somewhat uncanny configuration defines Ejecta. In other words, we mean for Ejecta to be understood as orphaned objects, by-products of loss, and signifiers of desire. Not only do the desks stand, perhaps impotently, as proxies for our parents, but they also signal a never-ending desire for parental approval, a primal measure of success.

35 The paralleled and paired desks find another equivalence in the conjoined hanging houses, titled Archimorph (Duplex). Intentionally ungrounded, yet evidently balanced, they affirm an illusion of equity, a seamless coupling. Again, through a simultaneous mounting and mirroring, two objects are poised as one. With each sculptural dyad, it appears as if one object is on top of the other. Similarly, measurements of time, money, or emotional strain (wage-earning, childrearing, etc.) often render marriage inequitable and comparative. A husband says, She is my better half. When not deployed sarcastically, this ostensibly endearing phrase still asserts a paradoxical notion of superiority among equals, a precarious balance within a partnership. The scale of the houses, somewhere between birdhouses, dollhouses, and architectural models, as well as the upside-down, split positioning suggests a fantastical or whimsical space. Archimorph (Duplex) might be hard to place within a real-world setting, but the material detail carefully aligned shingles on roofs and perfectly straight siding convey familiar forms. The lower house appears as a pristine white cupola, suburban, and exceedingly domestic in its dark grey shingled roof; the other is a more rustic and rural barnlike construction. Although their architectural styles differ, the houses insist on their Archimorph (Duplex) mixed media 24" x 19" x 58"

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37 singularity as a unified object. Cervino fills the windows with the siding of the other. Unlike the desks, one simply didn t slide into its counterpart; they both apparently occupy the same interior and exterior dimensions. Archimorph (Duplex) contains both houses within their partners concurrently as a wholly false volume and as somehow infinitely dense. This chimerical recession and compression of space can be perceived, oxymoronically, as harmonious competition, a desire for both structures to be in the same place at the same time. This drive for an impossible simultaneity of time and space compares to the somewhat boorish return of At Once Was I to its original place. (Also, as partners in shared domestic obligations and professional ambitions, we only illusively approximate the houses absurd equity.) The houses were made initially, about two years ago, as elements in a series of architectural structures perched on towers. Each 8-10 foot steel or wooden tower held a different edifice, such as a hunting blind, a cylindrical water tower, a fort, etc. The house forms shown here were perched atop individual towers and were not originally connected. After months of careful construction, Cervino showed these towers once briefly and then quickly considered them a failure. Although the houses have prudently been reconfigured and revised, their birth within an unsuccessful series 32

38 33 of sculptures, as cast-offs and as residue of a larger studio practice, signifies the intention of Ejecta. When I considered the series of towers then, the juxtaposition of similar architectural structures called to mind Bernd and Hilla Becher s rigorously systematic and comprehensive photographs of barns and house facades. (Their oeuvre more comprehensively consists of winding towers, water towers, coal tipples, cooling towers, grain elevators, coke ovens, oil refineries, blast furnaces, gas tanks, storage silos, and warehouses.) The Bechers repetition of single types of architecture allows for the scrutiny of varying details within each carefully composed photograph. Like the Bechers, the symmetry and structural taxonomy of each sculpture (furniture for Folie à deux and architecture for Archimorph) invite comparison of one architectural type with another. Cervino also is interested in this rigid formality, and one recognizes crucial details of courses of shingles nesting atop each other with sides of neat wood shakes and rhythmic nail hems. The form at first signals function, but Cervino renders them useless. Bechers buildings, too, are uninhabited, as they make formal sense out of industrial ruin. While it seems Cervino creates fantastical architecture with an enigmatic narrative, his modernist concerns with a resolutely closed form pulls him close to the Bechers.

39 Neither obstinately abstract nor definitively figurative, the relationship among the paired parts in both Folie à deux and Archimorph can be grasped as bodily. Certainly, one regards the desks in terms of the bodies that might sit at them and the bodies to whom they belonged. But, Archimorph, too, is in a sense more anthropomorphic than statically structural. In other words, the symmetry, the directionality, and the intersection of two forms in the sculptures evoke figures without any depiction of the human physique. The houses can be thought of as being orientated similarly to a human (i.e., heads and roofs on top, interiors that can be entered ). To be blunter, the coupling of the two seemingly autonomous parts connotes copulation. Because the houses assumedly are inserted into each other synchronously, and because the two heads are inverted, the arrangement approximates, in a way, the sexual position soixante-neuf. In Archimorph, Cervino fuses the two bodies of the houses into one composition, unified through the inferred connections of one house s exterior occupying the other s interior. Beyond the implications of physical intimacy of the synthesis in Archimorph and Folie à deux, this complete collusion of two individual objects ultimately can be seen as portraits of marriage. The sculptures offer the illusion of equity, but also solicit questions about how one s better half is dependent on, fused to, and balanced in tandem with the other. 34

40 CHAPTER FOUR AN EXCHANGE, PART I

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45 This exchanged occurred on August 24, 2007 and reveals a spirited attempt to communicate our frustrations about professional and personal obligations. Although not recent, the correspondence is included here to demonstrate one facet of Ejecta s collaborative dynamic. The content has not been edited in any way. Please note; the s appear in reverse chronological order.

46 CHAPTER FIVE NOBODY S PERFECT: WORLD S BEST

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48 NOBODY S PERFECT: WORLD S BEST Anthony Cervino s World s Best (2014) should be somewhat familiar to a certain generation of viewers. This fairly small, painted, cast bronze sculpture immediately calls to mind kitschy figurines from the 1970s. Specifically, Cervino s female figure with a blue ribbon adhered playfully on top of a monochromatic, exaggeratedly large head appropriates the aesthetic of Wallace Berrie, a now-defunct toy company, and its considerable collection of cast resin figurines called Sillisculpts. Easily identified by their stout bodies, oversized heads and goofy, emotive, cartoonish eyes, Wallace

49 Berrie s figurines offer expressions of love and gratitude to the world s best mother, father, boss, etc. with schmaltzy cuteness, while others dispense raunchy, crass humor. (The caption We re Made for Each Other, for example, is stamped below the figure of a woman, whose ample breasts rest on the bald head of her shorter male companion.) The off-white objects approximate the color and scale of ivory statuettes and, like Cervino s figurine, often are punctuated with a singular colored prop (ribbon, hat, necktie, etc.). Each Wallace Berrie Sillisculpt, typically only four to six inches tall, stands on a tiny pedestal, a parody of real sculpture. Nobody s Perfect is scrawled on World s Best s tubby middle. Despite World s Best s similarities to familiar kitsch objects, Cervino s sculpture does not slavishly mimic the Berrie aesthetic. He replaces the cartoonish face with one that is scaled proportionately to the torso, but not the head, and is oddly naturalistic in contrast to the stylized body. Cervino did not appropriate Wallace Berrie s mass-produced casts, but began his more labor-intensive sculpting process with a found plaster slip mold, salvaged from a small workshop near a local campground. Drawn to their usefulness in casting as well as their prosaic and popular subjects (religion, sports, holidays, cute animals, American patriotism, etc.), Cervino gathered several hundred of these old molds. 44

50 45 For World s Best, Cervino cast a cartoonish and stout Ziggy -type figure, modeled a Wallace Berry pedestal, and then sculpted a Madonna figurine s perfect visage, borrowed from another mold, into place on the oversized head. The Madonna face, placid and idealized on Cervino s sculpture, supplants the grotesque comedy of the 1970s originals. Moreover, the blue ribbon is not merely a girlish embellishment, but alludes both to Wallace Berrie s colored accessories and to the art-historical depiction of Madonna dressed in a blue mantle. In thinking about the historical and spiritual significance of motherhood, Cervino presses World s Best beyond kitsch. Through her profoundly stylized, stout stature and small size, he also draws an affinity with perhaps the oldest and one of the most famous depictions of a mother, the Venus of Willendorf (c. 28,000 25,000 BCE). Cervino s painted bronze mimics the look of stone, rather than Berrie s yellowing resin, to echo the maternal roundedness and dense materiality of the Venus of Willendorf. It may not be apparent at first that the source of World s Best face belongs to the mother of God ( the world s best mother ) and her stature to the idealized and stylized Paleolithic fertility goddess. But, World s Best clearly toggles between both referents, jumping from one arthistorical monument to another, and emphasizes each figure s honored maternity.

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52 World s Best painted cast bronze 3.25" x 4.75" x 2.50" 2014

53 Nowhere, of course, does Cervino mention explicitly that this sculpture is about motherhood. In fact, one would assume that the work s title would match the truism of the shirt, Nobody s Perfect. Wallace Berrie figurines state their messages plainly, but Cervino s juxtaposition of binary oppositions caricatured and naturalistic styles, crude and sacred referents underscore the incompatibility of the sculpture s identity. While the axiom, nobody s perfect is perfectly logical and rightly conveys the universally flawed human state, when applied to a mother, especially this mother, it is a travesty and a sacrilege. Mothers must be perfect selfless, compassionate, and everpresent. Mary, saintly, special, and beyond human, fulfills all the expectations of a child; her love and sanctity, of course, surpasses human imperfections. Even the Venus of Willendorf, with her full breasts and prominent vulva, promises pregnancy and fecundity above all. Despite, or perhaps because of these art historical associations, the work reflects an optimistic drive toward perfection in the midst of perpetual human flaws. World s Best is at once a trophy of greatness, an icon for prayer, a totem of fertility, and also conveys the saccharine sentiment of kitsch. This sculpture in a sense is self-negating, but it champions and readily admits imperfection with a kind of honesty absent from conventional dictums about motherhood. 48

54 49 Through the juxtaposition of two evidently opposing characters (perfection and imperfection, idealization and crassness, art and kitsch), Cervino provides a kind of moralistic parable. In other words, like its counterpart in this book Kuntry Mouse, it stands as a character in a fable that alludes to a didactic narrative about fantasy and reality. The fantasy is that the mother is perfect, that the child will see nothing but beauty and feel nothing but warmth, comfort, and protection. But, that tale is not necessarily a reality. The face of World s Best seems almost priggish, as its title connotes superiority above all. She appears smug and uncouth, myopic and dysmorphic. If Kuntry Mouse connotes the pleasures of the self and the fantasy of life beyond the constraints of family, then World s Best evokes the shortsighted fantasy that satisfaction can be contained entirely within the home, through a singular identity as a mother. World s Best functions in a way as a cautionary tale; the moral of the story is neither to rest superlatively on one s position as mother, nor simply to excuse one s faults with the quip, Nobody s Perfect.

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56 CHAPTER SIX THE FABLE OF KUNTRY MOUSE

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58 THE FABLE OF KUNTRY MOUSE On particular late afternoons, a mouse of humble means and limited scope sometimes strolled away from his hole in the sandy-grassy fields to a nearby mountain. (For a mere mound in a field to you and me can be a mountain to a mouse.) From his new vantage, he marveled at a magnificent city in the distance silhouetted by the late day sun. There he would sit, stroking his tail and gazing at the far-off place, dreamily imagining the imposing structures, the violent rivers of cars, and the splendidly wet aromas of squander.

59 He hungered to sample the sumptuous delicacies of that exotic destination. Instead of his usual tiresome fare of stale seeds and bitter beetles, he fantasized about glutting on greasy, salty nuts overlooked by greedy pigeons. And, rather than siphoning the fusty milk from the roots of the tall grasses near his home, he yearned to swill from sweet, cool blue pools dribbled from summer drinks. Most of all, he longed to swash in the syrupy spunk that gutters to the lowest recesses of the city and to let it soak deep into his fur, leaving it napped and heavy. Then, with delicate precision, he would tongue that tasty filth from his fine coat and leisurely preen it clean again. Every so often, the mouse thought about leaving his home and his mountain and making the long journey to indulge in these delights, but he always talked himself out of it, saying, A hole in the field is good enough for a mouse from the kuntry. My woman is warm, my children well-fed, and I know the hawk that hunts me. Satisfied, he would scurry home to his mouse hole never knowing that the city, always backlit by the blinding light of the setting sun, was merely a not-so-distant pile of disused cinder blocks and broken bottles. (For a mere pile of rubble to you and me can be a massive city of ardent desire to a mouse.) 54

60 Imagining is not doing, but doing isn t everything either. Stroke your tail for comfort Stroke your dick for pleasure You really can t lose For if you get them confused None will be the wiser 55

61 Kuntry Mouse painted cast bronze 3" x 6.75" x 3.25" 2014

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64 CHAPTER SEVEN A PRODIGAL SON: AT ONCE WAS I

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66 A PRODIGAL SON: AT ONCE WAS I Ed Stuber, the son of a trucker in south-central Pennsylvania, collected model airplanes as a kid. At some point in his life, all of his airplanes were crushed; then they were wrapped carefully in newspaper. In 2007 Anthony Cervino recovered these broken toys, along with Ed s diary and his scrapbook, from a dumpster. These rejected effects of Ed s boyhood are not terribly old; Ed was a child in the 1990s. They cannot be considered as valuable antiques, nor do they possess an aura of age, but the story to this point of rescue can be imagined in terms of somewhat distressing ambivalence.

67 As seen in his scrapbook and diary, he carefully recorded his familial relationships, his travels, general goings-on, and accomplishments. Surely, Ed played with and valued his model planes, a toy that requires meticulousness and attention. Because all of the model plane pieces were broken in a peculiar way, it doesn t seem as if they were destroyed accidentally. Of course, we don t know who broke them Ed, his little sister, his mentally ill uncle but, these parts then were wrapped carefully and thrown into the trash. An erratic trajectory can be read through these parts as they oscillate from value (fastidious model-building) to devalue (purposeful breaking) to value (prudent wrapping), and finally, to devalue (presumably permanent elimination in the dumpster). Less interested in reassembly or preservation, Cervino was drawn to the dubious history of these personal effects. Coupled with Ed s recorded and discarded boyhood, Cervino harnessed the tense fluctuation of these rejected objects. At Once Was I conveys a narrative force, physical propulsion, and a sense of violence that is concurrently dynamic and static. The plane parts paradoxically implode and explode at the center of the canvas. Rudders, wings, fuselages, and propellers converge as a scene of unfathomable crisis. Tiny human figures and bombs are scattered throughout, providing a sense of scale that makes 62

68 63 the overall scene devastatingly, unimaginably, and almost sublimely immense. The overlapping objects create a tangled mess. Individual, discreet forms that might signal their source as autonomous toy components are unified by the gray color of paint primer. This matte, plastic surface unifies the chaos and creates a multi-part abstract composition. The color also mimics the original materiality of new model airplane pieces, a gray plastic that serves as a blank canvas for the adhesives and paints of model toy enthusiasts. In the midst of this density of parts, the cylinder of a broken plane body in the center of the canvas is aimed like the barrel of a gun directly at the viewer s line of sight. Through the sense of excess, it appears as an unexpected absence, an abyss within this war-torn topography. This hole in the center of the canvas (sculpture) is like a blind spot, a recess for the eye simultaneously to drift through, to focus, and to counteract the violent projectiles of the sculpture. Cervino examines space almost cubistically, as the work can be defined at once as abstraction and representation, accident and intent, sculpture and painting. In its color and subject, At One Was I alludes to Charles Ray s Unpainted Sculpture (1997), a careful to-scale casting and remaking of a Pontiac Grand Am in which the driver had died. Ray unifies his painstakingly reassembled, wrecked car

69 by painting it this same grayish color of primer. Cervino confronts the material aftermath of a fatal accident more obliquely than Ray. He abstracts the seemingly straightforward narrative of a crash and surpasses Ray s adherence to a kind of reality. Ray s specificity, a single and particular victim of the accident, stands in contrast to the collectivism implied in Cervino s allusions to trauma and accidents. When Cervino made At Once Was I, he also created two similarly constructed scenes of automobile crashes. (My mother died in a car accident, so a reference to any fatal disaster intersects with personal tragedy for me.) Given the boyish sense of play and almost comic book-type violence of the scene, At Once Was I could be seen as a Roy Lichtenstein pow! or bang! in sculptural relief. But, the work transcends any snarky humor or irony of pop art. Instead, Cervino assertively displays his handiwork (the accident is no accident) and an undeniable insistence on formalism. The work s dynamism is contained within the puddle that surrounds the sculptural relief, and then is circumscribed again by the pristine expanse of rectangular canvas. The pools of plastic cover and organically frame the plane parts and provide a sort of geography; the slightly layered plastic ridges and knolls convey the sense of looking down at a crash site. Cervino establishes a tension between 64

70 65 this aerial perspective of an imagined horizontal scene and the vertical realm of viewing it on the wall. Ultimately, the work evokes a mushroom cloud that hovers over, or a toxic spill that oozes around, a catastrophe. Setting this tumultuous association of bombs and crashes aside, these rounded forms approximate, in a sense, Morris Louis s Florals ( ) stain paintings that are color and shape at once, abstraction and figuration, figure and ground. Of course, Louis s colors soak into the warp and weft of the fabric, while Cervino creates surfaces that exist both within and above its painted canvas. Ultimately, where Louis presses on the limits of painting what constitutes opacity and transparency, flatness and depth, Cervino examines parallel material limits in sculptural terms textural differences of canvas, plastic, and paint, as well as the bounds of sculptural relief. Cervino s pond-like plastic is suspended above its pristinely painted, pink-hued white ground. He creates a terrain that somehow makes the objects project and recede, paradoxically as both a minefield and quicksand. The overt subject of this plane crash, albeit one that has no direct real-world referent, nonetheless connotes a great disaster or the immediate aftermath of war. The scale surpasses the diminutive size of toys to suggest a grander,

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72 At Once Was I mixed media 98" x 48" x 16"

73 more historic tableau. At Once Was I, with intersections of parts that radiate at various angles from the center of the canvas with alacrity, prompts a curious resonance with Jacques-Louis David s Oath of the Horatii (1785). Cervino s work echoes in a way the diagonal thrust of the brothers arms and the swords in the father s hands at the center of David s painting. Moreover, the arches and curvilinear bodies of the women and children, which find their formal equivalent in Cervino s rounded spillage, frame the action and emphasize the dynamism of the strong male bodies swearing their oath to fight to the death for Rome. Seen together, both works illustrate a gendered impulse to battle, the boyish playing of war. Despite these compositional echoes, perhaps a clearer comparison is Théodore Gericault s Raft of the Medusa (1819). Cervino s composition both approximates and abstracts the vigorous strivings of Gericault s figures on the brink of rescue and the unfathomable horrors of death on the crowded raft. Admittedly, this comparison of Cervino s ejecta with the epitome of ambitious French academic painting is less than humble. Apologies aside, Cervino s diagonal positioning of the planes bodies and wings emulates Gericault s intensity, compositional density, and brutal carnage in the aftermath of a fatal crash. 68

74 69 With or without Gercicault, David, or Ray on his mind, Cervino had been collecting plastic sprues leftovers from toy model kits (read ejecta ) and created a body of work that was exhibited here in the Flashpoint Gallery, titled Anti-Plastic in Fall The cache of plane model parts from Ed Stuber was serendipitous. Cervino adhered compositions of plastic parts on canvases to create abstract landscapes, vaguely urban scenes, and grids with almost Mondrianlike precision. He then carefully poured plastic on these pristine canvases. Abstractions and accidents took over, yet the tension between form and formless in the works was painstakingly and intentionally contrived. At the time, Anti-Plastic was a marker of professional success. The exhibition would help his case for tenure and promotion as an art professor, reaffirm his connection to the Baltimore and Washington, DC after our move to rural Pennsylvania, and conveniently occur shortly before the birth of our second daughter. Many of the titles of individual works in the exhibition were salutations or valedictions. As this body of work seemed clearly inaugural, Cervino focused more on a sense of beginning than on a wistful good bye. At Once Was I, the centerpiece of the exhibition, explicitly summons these temporal shifts, not simply to nineteenth-century history painting or

75 the artist s boyhood in the 1970s (or Ed s more recent 1990s childhood), the title itself plays with tenses. At Once conveys present-ness with a vengeance, then Was I quickly undercuts this climax and elicits the past. The viewer anticipates a vivid telling of a personal story, as the I implies a kind of self-portraiture. Now, for this exhibition in the Flashpoint Gallery, At Once Was I hangs in the exact same place on the wall as it did in But, it is displayed in its crate, meaning it does not appear identical to its earlier installation and no longer can be seen simply as it was. Although one (modernist) marker of art is its instantaneity of meaning and sense of presentness regardless of age, Cervino does not permit At Once Was I simply to continue to exist as its younger, static self. Of course, perhaps this is a self-effacing gesture that can be understood as a protection against perceived failure. With some sense of defeat, Cervino admits that the work has been crated since its exhibition in Anti-Plastic. Because it has not been displayed in seven years, it may seem as though the work does not meet contemporary criteria for art-world success. While an exhibition record is not, of course, the only marker of a work s efficacy or an artist s achievement, the crating of this work signals a sense of futility in artmaking as well as Cervino s own intermittent restlessness in his studio practice. 70

76 71 Ejecta provides a rare opportunity to go back to an almost identical installation of At Once Was I and imagine a sort of temporal stoppage. But, as the aphorism goes, You cannot step twice into the same river. Cervino protects against this unfeasible, even foolish attempt at time travel by displaying the work packed expertly within its handmade crate. Like the Prodigal Son returning to his home, At Once Was I comes back to its original place and questions Cervino s path of artistic success. (The parable also invokes a father s unconditional love and is antithetical to Cervino s own experience with his father.) Perhaps in defense of another loss, Cervino crates At Once Was I to frame, shelter, and preserve it, promising it never will be unpacked.

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78 CHAPTER EIGHT AN EXCHANGE, PART II

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80 Shannon Egan: The work on this exhibition clearly has been collaborative. You typically don t include me when you have made other sculptures, and I m curious about your thoughts on this kind of involvement. I ve spent more time in your studio in the last six months than I have in the last fifteen years. How has my presence affected your process? Has it been frustrating or affirming? Do I seem different as curator and collaborator than as wife and mother to your children? Anthony Cervino: Although I have rarely actively pursued it, the idea of creative collaboration, in general, has always held a certain allure for me. The appeal is in my admittedly flawed fantasy that a collaborator will not merely compliment my strengths, but will somehow accommodate all my shortcomings a kind of selfish safety net. However, you and I have a long history of collaboration that makes the most of our strengths while also acknowledging our weaknesses. As parents, with our shared finances, among house maintenance, and given our common career experiences in academia, our division of labor has always been collaborative and with an equal stake in the successes or failures we might experience as a domestic partnership. I am convinced that our decision-making process is stronger due to the compromises of teamwork. As far as the pockets of our identities that we have held back well, I m not sure when or why we adopted a policy where our most individually personal work (studio time for me, research for you) was somehow kept more private. 75

81 I think it had something to do with trying to protect each other from our greatest individual sources of stress, but honestly that makes little sense since that stress clearly does manifest at home. So, perhaps it had more to do with ego and the desire to retain some sense of autonomous identity in a relationship where we do share so much, especially around art. In the end, we ve spent a chunk of our marriage figuring out how to collaborate at home, so bringing that dynamic into the studio makes sense, although I am not sure it would have worked a few years ago. I won t lie though; having you in the studio as witness to sculptures-in-progress has had its moments of embarrassment and frustration, but those have been relatively contained to the first few weeks of attempting to convey some of my ideas for this show and consequential new work. Even though we have always approached art from different vantages both professionally and personally in the end you are not a maker (artist). So, often the trajectory of a work-inprogress or a newly forming idea is so abstract that it can only be intuited, not explained. That intuition needs to be informed by some first hand understanding of process, materiality, space you know. So, in those moments it has been frustrating. However, I am loving the way the work decompresses after our conversations and, of course, in reading your equally vulnerable drafts of essays where you discuss the artwork. This back-andforth has helped me adopt a new rhythm to my studio 76

82 practice and, so far, things seem to be working. Any fears I had of self-editing or losing some sense of my sense of ego in the work seems completely unfounded, and it is rewarding, not threatening, to see your voice emerge in the work. I often joke about you and I being blissfully codependent, dysfunction somehow neutered because we agree that it is ultimately mutually beneficial. That is such a terrible thought, although I guess it was the impetus for Folie à Deux (the hybrid desk sculpture), so maybe it s ok? I don t know. In the end inviting you into my creative process represents an act of confidence that is, perhaps, long overdue. Or, maybe including you now really all comes down to my own guilt for having never really read your Ph.D. dissertation. What do you think? What have you been surprised by during our collaboration on Ejecta? SE: What, you never read my dissertation?! I ve been thinking about this collaboration as a kind of pressure gauge that s been released, or maybe a pot of soup that s been simmering, or a cake that s been baking, and is finally ready to eat. The soup, not the gauge, ha! I m not too sure what the metaphor ought to be, but there s something in the timing of this exhibition that feels right for right now. I agree; it wouldn t have worked a couple of years ago. I think the trajectory of our careers where we are now, how we see things now 77

83 has made this possible. Focusing on you then would have meant selfishly, or insecurely, that I wasn t focusing on something else, something more academic or more aligned with my career goals. It s been extraordinarily helpful, both professionally and personally, which essentially, as you said, is one in the same, to be part of a decision-making process, even if I m not part of the real construction. I too felt a bit vulnerable and silly at first in the studio, more like a kind of posturing play-actor than as a legitimate maker. And, I m not identifying as an artist; you made this work. But, I do have pretty firm thoughts on display, content, and aesthetic, no? So, this collaboration, for me, reflects a kind of interesting in-between state between creating and curating because each decision has been pretty porous and transparent. In any case, now it feels freeing in a way to work with you, or to acknowledge more publicly all the advice I have sought or the work we have already done together (reading drafts of my essays, discussing interactions with colleagues, curating other exhibitions, selecting artists, designing shows, etc.). So, Ejecta was intended to be at first a kind of device that took studio-practice residue, in conjunction with recent ideas and long-standing thoughts about parenthood, loss, and mediocrity, to promote fictive, successful identities, to act as a kind of retrospective, and perhaps to mark the end of your recent bodies of work. How do you feel about the other works that never made it into this exhibition? I m thinking, of course, 78

84 about the Hardanger Fartøyvernsenter life-saving station sculpture you had intended to build, as well as the videos and photographs you shot. Other recent or older sculptures could have been included in the exhibition, too. Do these unfinished or excluded works feel like failures or disappointments in any way? Why do you see them as now not belonging? Would you still make the life-saving station after this exhibition? AC: Well, the editing process is always an unwieldy beast. Of course, you train to be critically responsive to your usual processes of making, as well as to the happy accidents and all that, but that is only one kind of filter that the work goes through. The physical limitations of any particular exhibition space are inevitably a factor, especially with a show like Ejecta where the work has largely been designed with a specific gallery in mind. Simply living with work in the studio provides another filter. The cycle of making a new sculpture, loving it, hating it, loving it again, threating to dismantle it, and, if all goes well, eventually accepting the work as finished is a passive aggressive process. Editing through a kind of agonistic flirtation. From the start of this collaboration, I rejected the idea that this show should be a retrospective in any academic sense. The work we ve included in Ejecta is more like a geological core sample. I see it as representative not only of literal art objects that I have 79

85 made, but is inclusive too of my favored processes and materials my very studio practice on display, in a way. In addition to a few legitimate sculptures, we ve included finished objects that were never intended to be Art, cannibalized parts of older sculptures, parts of things that were supposed to be finished sculptures but that failed in some way or another, new takes on older works, and found objects that have either already been included in other installations or that simply have kept me company in the studio over the years, always in the periphery as I made other things. I have attempted to be very honest with the taxonomy of these various components. Given the vast amount of stuff in my studio, I was surprised which objects filtered down into the final installation. When the idea of this show was first discussed two years ago, I was already listing the things I knew for sure I would want to include. It has been very curious how few of those objects made the final cut. What this tells me is that the editing process for this exhibition has relied on a brutal honesty about how to best embody the past several years of art making both holistically and critically. Of course, editing older work and studio ephemera into new installations or collections is a very different process than making new work in response to that very act of editing. The new sculptures, videos, photos that were originally proposed for inclusion in Ejecta were shelved as I saw the whole show take shape. Originally, these elements, especially the work based 80

86 on my multiple artist residencies in Norway over the past few years, were supposed to symbolically point forward. But, in all honestly, I have no idea what I m going to make next, so it seemed dishonest to purport these objects as the future. The life-saving station sculpture you mentioned (an elegant but ultimately utilitarian little wooden structure I fixated on at a shipbuilding museum in Norway) was supposed to symbolically suggest some shift in my studio practice. In the end, as I assembled the rest of the sculptures, the show as a whole transformed from a rather pessimistic self-critique to a much more considered survey of studio practice in general; the need for the conceptual counterbalance of these new works faded away. I will likely make them at some point. Or not. SE: I like the metaphor you used of a geological core sample to describe the work in Ejecta, particularly in trying to make sense of the connections of the works in the crate-cases, The Ejecta. It s a nice way of continuing the geological connotations of our term ejecta (the stuff thrown from volcanic eruptions or meteor impacts). Why do you think now is a good time to take on this kind of pseudo-scientific survey of your studio practice? AC: Yes, the comparison of ejecta in some imagined geologic sample as a record of waste, or destruction, or simply as an event seems like an apt description of 81

87 what can happen in the studio. Most days you expect to work an active but relatively mechanical routine then POW! there is that rare explosive breakthrough, or breakdown, that radically rewrites the direction of things. Those moments of punctuation are interesting to me right now I suspect, because I have finally accrued enough of them to look for patterns. I am especially interested in the relationship of successes to failures or, I should say, perceived successes and failures since it isn t always clear which is which. This show, in many ways, is a vehicle for decoding those events positive and negative that are recorded in the strata of my sculptures and my processes of artmaking. SE: So, you feel like you finally have enough of a body of work to look retrospectively, even if this isn t a retrospective. But, I am still curious how the exhibition assuages any anxiety about looking backwards at this particular moment. Do you have anxiety about looking backwards? Ultimately, I suppose this question is trying to get at your thoughts on aging. You are six years older than I am and often claim to be in a different place because of your age. At this point in my career, I often feel frenetically competitive or too complacent. Again, how does the work correspond to the question of why now? AC: Again, that word retrospective, as an endorsement of professionalism or as a signifier of a successful career 82

88 as an artist, makes my skin crawl. Also, while this exhibition is certainly reflective of my object-making history, I hesitate to concede that it is somehow about looking back on a career in a self-congratulatory way or from some arbitrary mid-point. I have no way to honestly gauge the success of the work I have made or the quality of my career, and I am increasingly losing interest in seeking that validation from the length of my resume, interest from collectors, or other external measures. So, why do this show now? Sure, I m in my mid-forties and taking stock of what I ve done and where it s all going. That is such a mundane response though. My sexier or perhaps more theatrical answer would probably have something to do with the timelessness and mutability of art or my interest in the unfixable or shifting notions of value in labor, art, etc. Really though, it just comes down to acknowledging that I have reached an intersection where my desire to explore new modes of artmaking are outweighing my interest in continuing a trajectory of creative investigations that I can trace back to the late 1990s. Ejecta is not a celebration, nor an apology for past work, nor an attempt to re-contextualize a career with an eye to validating oneself. Rather, it is a premonitory reflection, a way to scry creative ambitions yet-to-come. For example, I foresee more collaborative ventures, like this project with you. 83

89 On aging, I can only add that crossing the threshold into middle age had necessitated ruminations on personal goals, an editing process of things yet-to-do versus things accomplished. This, in turn, has translated into a similar survey in the studio. Ejecta is an exhibition reliant on editing as a creative act, so one impulsive reply to why now? is that I simply reached a critical mass of work from which to whittle. It s curious you mentioned being torn between a drive to be competitive versus the desire to be complacent in your career. My six-plus years on you does not entitle me to don some mantle of wisdom, but I m not so sure I see those ideas of complacency or competitiveness as being oppositionally relational. Do you? They both come with some fairly negative connotations, two sides of the same coin. From our more casual, daily conversations, I thought you associated complacency with a somewhat more romantic, if dated, notion of settling down and not just settling. Do you associate complacency itself with failure? SE: I don t have a desire to be complacent right now, but it feels like a byproduct of the larger matrix of dual careers, children, and a need for security. I suppose the distinction can be made between complacency and contentment, meaning one implies a lack of ambition and the other suggests satisfaction with current circumstances. So, yes, complacency at this point does 84

90 seem like a failure. But, like you, part of my own aging process is about slowly letting go of hitting particular targets and being grateful for the accomplishments already achieved. And, then I write that, and panic. I m not sure if I m saying that too soon or giving in too quickly. I want to go back to something more specific in the exhibition. In the work Folie à deux, where your father s desk is paired with my mother s, you have chosen to include a cast bronze sculpture as part of the installation, playfully titled Shitty Mouse. It can be understood as a complement to Kuntry Mouse, both in subject and style. Although Shitty Mouse is less finished, both appear as anthromorphized characters in a fable, a reference, obviously to the story of the City Mouse and the Country Mouse. Shitty Mouse has a mouse head with exaggeratedly large ears and walks on all fours with strangely human limbs and hands. You ve sculpted its long curvy tail in a way that reveals a pronounced and puckered anus. In the display, Shitty Mouse skulks around the legs of your father s desk. When I was writing the essay on Folie à deux, I knew that you would be including this sculpture in the show. As an art historian, my inclination is to describe all aspects of this installation in its entirety; to ignore such a provocative element as Shitty Mouse felt strangely deceitful. But, you asked me not to mention it. I feel compelled here to acknowledge and document it as part of Ejecta. Why did you want it left out of the essay? 85

91 AC: I disagree that these two sculptures are treated inequitably, especially as I understand them as representing dual aspects of a single personality. SE: Whose personality? Yours? AC: Mine. Yours. It could describe anyone who, due to inaction or drive, muses on the width of the line separating regret and that very sense of contentment you spoke of a moment ago. Kuntry Mouse is happy being a voyeur. The act of fantasizing feeds his desires, which ultimately leave him fulfilled, or fulfilled enough. His fantasies fuel his dreams, and he takes great pleasure in those dreams as their own reward. Shitty Mouse, like City Mouse does in the proper fable, represents action, risk, decadence, and even selfishness. Unlike the story, his name here also implies that, while he lives vicariously, he is also mired by the guilt of his actions. He feels shitty for being indulgent, or perhaps he is aware that pursuing his pleasures comes with the risk of actually realizing them negating their appeal. Even so, this doesn t stop him. Together, the two mice personify the fraught co-existence of both restraint and self-indulgence, of fantasy and reality, even of success and failure by which we measure all decisions. At its core, this is the subject of Ejecta. 86

92 To your question about why I asked you to hold back on writing about Shitty Mouse, in the Folie à deux desk sculpture Shitty Mouse is intended as a surprise element. It is something to discover beyond the primarily formal relationship among the furniture components. So, really I was just hoping to keep his placement kind of quiet. Knowing too much about his presence or speculating too publically about his possible meaning undermines his function in the sculpture. He is partially hidden under the chair of my father s desk. Once you spot him, he manages to single-handedly disrupt the entire structure of that display by merely hinting at some more elaborate, if ambiguous, narrative at work in the sculpture. The impetus for this edited and condensed interview originated during our 2013 residency at Kunstnarhuset Messen in Ålvik, Norway. The exchange began in earnest in June 2015 and was completed over a few days when both the writing and art making for Ejecta was most fervently active. 87

93 Lifesaving station at the Hardanger Fartøyvernsenter in Norheimsund, Norway photograph 2013

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