Bagged Out - a virtual exhibition of paper bag drawings


 This is a virtual exhibition of paper bag drawings - nothing more / nothing less. You'll probably never see these works in a tangible setting - at least I hope not. Thankfully they will never descend to the vaults of curatorial limbo where much of our patrimony seeks the light of day. Conversely, if uncared for, the chalk deposits will lose their grip and the image will fall particle by particle, just like pollen drifting in the wind. The brown bag will eventually deteriorate too and assume its place in the compost heap, recycled into future growth. That actually may be the beauty of it - who knows?

 No curators to pontificate with existential labels and historical revisionism. No changing or altering of titles by museological career gougers. No docents with prescribed interpretations. No awkward spaces and state sponsored catalogues, or thank you's for Canada Council's government grants fostering the arts. No museum membership drive at the front door,  no backroom boards with their head down in a plate full of identity politics. No security, inane restrictions, or pernicious Faucian fears or targeted measures to keep the museum goer safe from the boogy man. No dirty masks for kids, vaccine passports, or pandemic rhetoric, let alone "sophisticated vaccers need only enter this party." This exhibit is virtually free for the time being. However, I do not see it as a suitable replacement to the cultural place, just a sad reminder of the disintegration of physical space and our once significant enjoyment in it.

We have now become, and are, the brown paper bag -  and we are all bagged out. When we once filled the paper bag with dreams and the bounty of the harvest, we now fill it with nightmares of turbulence - mirroring the times with a plague induced narrative. We have filled the bag with irrelevant case counts and a mask security blanket for an abstract bureaucracy. 

It wasn't always that way. We can thank Margaret Knight for designing the brown paper bag your mom left on the counter, which you grabbed before you walked to school. Like an animated sculpture it determined your leave taking and destination. Its content was unique and it contained your connection with your domestic identity - it was your individualism. Some kids understood, some suspected and protected their contents. It was a container of strategy. With the lunch bag one learned the real system of commerce. - to barter, bluff, estimate, judge, apply the art of free trade, equate, assess lunch table rhetoric and its nasty brother "regulation through rumor".

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/meet-female-inventor-behind-mass-market-paper-bags-180968469/


 

 

 It was inevitable that the paper bag would make a come back from plastics, We pushed it too far and we knew it. Our oceans and fishermen filled us in on that a long time ago. So why draw on a paper bag? Why use it when one has access to the the tablet or other digital resources? I'm just the messenger, but anyone that has a penchant to draw will at one time or another, consider the surface that they wish to contrive an image on. What are the seductive capacities involved? Does the object have a tactile history? Expensive and finely milled papers with decal edges hidden away in art store cabinets come to mind. Intimidating in their cost, they are art objects in themselves daring one to mark and smudge it's pristine surface, a surface of commercial value. But if one loves to draw they invariably develop a love affair with the surfaces they draw on, not the cultural market they are configured in. The paper bag has folds and is often creased and used, sometimes stained with food stuff, or stamped labels denoting the location it originated from - all of this can be configured into a drawing. 

The following drawings are at once incidental and thoughtful. They chronicle the past and present, my neighborhood kids, pop culture, artists, rich and the poor, even a dog. A drawing can be like a quick discussion one commits to, sometimes ever so brief, but still... we do it non the less.

Steven Rhude, Wolfville, NS 

 


   

This is not a Pipe, it's a Bag Pipe, chalks on paper bag, Steven Rhude

"Paper Bag Princess," chalks on someone's lunch bag, Steven Rhude


"Handbag, After Rembrandt," chalks on paper bag, Steven Rhude

 


"Duchamp, Paper Bag Prince," chalk on a gift bag from New Minas, Steven Rhude



"Sun nap" chalks on gift bag from New Minas, Steven Rhude

 

Pauper#1, chalks on gift bag, Steven Rhude


Pauper#2, chalks on gift bag, Steven Rhude



Pauper#3 (lydia), chalks on bag from Wolfville gift shop, Steven Rhude



Pauper#4, chalks on bag from Nova Scotia gift shop, Steven Rhude



Poor House Pauper #5, chalks on gift bag from Digby, Steven Rhude

 


 Peace Bag, chalks on lunch bag, Steven Rhude



Portrait of Marina, chalks on gift bag, Steven Rhude



Christo bag, chalks on Nova Scotia gift bag, Steven Rhude



Dove, chalks on gallery art bag, Steven Rhude



Pale Dora Maar, chalks on gallery gift bag, Steven Rhude



Truck Driver, Bag Man, and Pundit, Jerry Saltz, chalks on gift bag, Steven Rhude



Marty (for Lisa), chalks on gift bag, Steven Rhude



Portrait of a Protester (Eddie Carvery) - Africville, chalks on gift bag



Portrait of Joseph Bueys, Conte on gallery bag, Steven Rhude



Whose Maud, chalks on gift bag, Steven Rhude



Ready for You, chalks on gift bag, Steven Rhude



For What maters..., chalks on gift bag, Steven Rhude



Maud's Socks, chalks and ink on gift bag, Steven Rhude

 


 

Whose Identity, chalks and ink on gift bag, Steven Rhude



The Biologist (kid from the hood), chalks on gift bag, Steven Rhude



Sasha in the Sun (kid from the hood), chalks on gift bag, Steven Rhude



Spiky the Wizard (kid from the hood), chalks on gift bag, Steven Rhude

 


 

Amos the famous and his brother another (kids from the hood), chalks on gift bag, Steven Rhude

 

 

Comments

  1. A wonderful commentary on life and art. Bags full of great images!

    ReplyDelete

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