The last thing that local artist Warren Craghead needed was something to keep him up at night—more time to kill, more spaces to fill. A hobby? Pffft. Craghead needs a hobby like he needs another art gallery, one more space to crowd with work.
“At this point, the hobby is survival,” Craghead told me two weeks ago in his studio, where he was preparing for “Impera Et Divide,” the six-person show he curated with visiting artist Pedro Moura at Second Street Gallery, on display through April 25. “Taking care of the kids, trying to get sleep…”
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For Craghead, however, part of that survival means finding a new space for his art, no matter how small. The work in Second Street’s tiny Dové Gallery show—prints and drawings steeped in the structured worlds of comics, sure, but inspired by poetry, politics and punk rock—is explosive enough to buckle the walls of the small room. (In fact, there’s an overabundance of art; Craghead has already restocked the space with new work after selling a good portion during his show’s first week.) When I visited Craghead’s studio, his desk resembled a pile of paper on legs, overflowing with scraps of drawings that he’ll scan into his computer to add to his labyrinthine collection of websites and online collages.
Give him an inch of paper, each space seems to say, and Warren Craghead will draw you a mile.
So that’s precisely what C-VILLE did—offered Craghead a small space. Specifically, that space on page 21 and linked here—a single page, front and back. Craghead accepted with a laugh and a shout of “Let’s get into trouble, baby!” And in two weeks, he turned our single page into a 14-page companion piece to the Second Street exhibit—to be torn out, folded up and enjoyed. (The book, crafted for C-VILLE, also resides permanently on wcraghead.com.)
It’s a useful skill to have, making big statements with small means. After all, gallery space is harder and harder to come by for local artists. The Downtown Mall lost three galleries in the last year: Les Yeux du Monde left its longtime Water Street location last June, Sage Moon Gallery followed suit in December, and Migration: A Gallery closed its doors roughly one month later, following a January exhibit of digital collage prints from Craghead’s 2007 book, How To Be Everywhere.
In short, galleries have limits: borders, maximum capacities, rent and utility bills. And Craghead doesn’t need limits because, with the right combination of trapdoors and wormholes, he can actually be everywhere. Or close to it.
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READ ON • For a review of the show, click here. • For a slideshow of the exhibit, click here. |
Each of his projects starts, unassumingly, with drawing. “Whether it’s in my sketchbook, or on a beautiful piece of paper…or tiny pieces of things,” he explained, his eyes bright behind his glasses. “That’s really at the core of what I do, drawing.”
But, as he quickly admits, things quickly burst outwards from these smaller spaces. “It sort of spins off from that. I do digital collages, based on drawings, as a way to complicate drawing, to bring things like color and texture to them. And then there are the books, which put the drawings into sequence…”
It’s recycling, in a sense, and it reaches its fullest potential on the Internet, where a central Craghead hub (wcraghead.com) collects what he described once as the “flotsam” —every bit of Warren Craghead ephemera, each impulse that makes him put pen or pencil to paper. His drawings, his daughter Violet’s doodles, the postcards he sends to the couple hundred fans on his mailing list—roughly 2,000 cards sent during the last eight years—all get catalogued on one of a series of project-related blogs.
“It’s like the idea of how to be everywhere,” said Craghead about his work’s multiple destinations. “I’ve gotta keep one foot in the white cube of the gallery—like Second Street Gallery, a beautiful, nice art space. I want to keep one foot in the street art things I do. One foot in the comics world.” And, while he’s at it, one foot in the Internet.
Perhaps the most impressive example of Craghead’s space expansion is “A Map’s Little Spell” (amapslittlespell.com), a site that presents a collaged suburban scene—a mess of Americana scattered across a foggy lawn. Click one portion of the scene and you’re pulled by some loose thread into a new room or yard, confronted with mirrors or birdhouses. It’s possible to find your way out through a few intuitive clicks of the mouse, but Craghead doesn’t make it easy—instead, he makes it engaging, a compulsion.
“His use of the web was way ahead of its time,” said Leah Stoddard, the former executive director of Second Street Gallery who booked Craghead’s current show and an independent consultant for artists.
“He uses himself as a source for his own future work,” she added. “He’ll always be evolving, and always be fresh. And I just think that’s smart.”
According to Stoddard, the ways in which people spend time and money have recently made the traditional artist/gallery relationship—man makes a painting, which hangs in gallery, which sells the painting—less relevant. “His model is what’s going on now,” she said.
“You see it in the art fairs, where artists are doing works on paper, printmaking, more discreet objects. They’re trying to think about how we encounter them in the world. He’s been doing that for years.”
Asked about the wealth of work he puts online, Craghead seemed to agree. “The problem with the Internet now isn’t getting paid,” he said. “It’s getting noticed.”
Once you take notice, however, Craghead’s whole world swarms in—bits of confounded common life and pieces of surreal suburban poetry. It’s art that yearns to impose order on emotion, offers a map and then disintegrates at the first touch. Which leaves you wanting another piece.
“I just kept going ‘I want to see more,’” said local artist Rob Tarbell, whom I spoke with after the opening of “Impera Et Divide” at Second Street. “I grabbed a book, I grabbed a show catalogue, for that continuation. It’s not so much that I’m looking for an end—it’s just the perpetuation of the whole thing.”
Now that perpetuation continues here, with a space that’s much bigger than it seems, by a local artist one step closer to being everywhere.
Take a video tour of "Impera et Divide" with curator Warren Craghead.
