Pacific Index

Pacific students respond to the current Cawein art installation

Upon first seeing the pieces formed by Portland-based multimedia artist Alyson Provax posted up in the Cawein Gallery, I was confronted with a vague feeling of nothingness; almost comparable to the depleted noise of the air conditioning in Cawein. 

A placard written by Provax greeted me before the exhibit, opening with: “Last year I thought I read Mary Ruefle as saying that we spend our lives repeating a single sentence. As it turns out that’s not what she said, but I didn’t realize until I returned to the essay a second time. This is fitting, because lately I’ve been thinking about projection and interpretation; how much of a relationship between me and you is between us, and how much of it remains sliced within our individual selves.” 

I met two students milling about in the gallery and asked their opinions. The first student spoke, and asked to stay anonymous: “They looked better from far away. Up close they look like half-assed Facebook poetry.” 

After reading the previously included placard, they began to laugh, and then the second student proceeded to speak, “I really don’t see what she was attempting. What I see is that she’s just telling me what she’s saying and not really building anything off of the phrases, besides the same shape over and over again.”

They weren’t necessarily wrong. Each piece, every single one is untitled and only differentiated by the sayings used. Posed on a stark white background, whether it be simple cardstock or wispy papier mache. Many of the pieces of paper are extremely wrinkled, as if they were pulled from a trash can in the UC after a football recruitment lunch. An aforementioned aphorism takes center stage, and is stamped over and over again to form a design, or instead is simply there, with some sort of space or disconnection between each letter (the pages of a book, two separate index cards, scattered all over the multiple edges of the wrinkled large tissue). 

The first student spoke again: “Wow, so deep. All she did was slam her stamp against the paper and then charged 1k.” (The cheapest piece in the gallery was 800 dollars.) “They just look like high quality birthday or business cards.”  

The second student: “You know what I really hate, how they’re untitled.” 

When asked why, he said “Because these pieces ruin the allure of any untitled piece of music, painting, or whatever. This has to be the most pretentious thing I’ve ever seen, and having the audacity to not even title the pieces makes it even more unbearable. I might actually shell out nine hundred bucks so I can let a two year old draw all over one of them.” 

“It’ll look so much better if that happened,” stated the first student, as they laughed again. “Who would even hang this in their house? It doesn’t look good on a wall.” They laughed and walked away. 

It’s true, there is an absence of warmth, of anything, except for the consuming nature of each piece. How they repeat over and over again in our heads, even when we don’t respond to them. They’re mundane, and the anxiety they create even more so. But much like how these axioms are repeated continuously, they take on a new meaning. The art developed a consciousness and a being, beyond what the phrase could outwardly express.