ASU alumna Allison Fuentes at the Grant Street Studios building where her exhibit is featured inside the Step Gallery. (Photo by Tynin Fries)Confusion greeted the reporter as he walked in to the Step Gallery over an hour late to the opening reception of "No. Title," an exhibit curated by Allison Fuentes, who is currently pursuing a masters in teaching English to speakers of other languages.
Upon entering, his eyes met with the crisp white, four-walled box clearly labeled as the Step Gallery, from which a deluge of freshman art students drained into an unmarked hallway at stage left — leaving behind a disarray of folding chairs and a projection of a film with Russian subtitles. The brightly colored, sexually charged paintings complementing these very words were nowhere to be seen.
Unsure of exactly where the “art” was to be found, the reporter immediately followed the cluster of people with apparent purpose into the hallway, determined to solve the mystery of where the art was hiding.
After wandering past several graduate art studios, realizing the group of students likely had nothing to do with "No. Title," looping around the building twice, and finding no clearly demarcated art exhibit, the reporter thought it best to return to the main hall of the building to find someone — anyone — that could explain what exactly was going on.
As it turned out, there really was no exact answer.
Step Gallery — located in a converted warehouse on the corner of Grant and 7th St. in downtown Phoenix and operated by the ASU Herberger Institute School of Art — serves a purpose as dynamic as the work it houses. It offers both graduate studio space and a gallery, hosting MFA thesis exhibitions and proposal-driven, student-run exhibitions.
Since the space operates primarily as place of experimentation and exploration in the world of art, Herberger’s website notes, “The selection of exhibitions will inevitably, over time, include content not appreciated or understood by all viewers and visitors. If educational value can be demonstrated, diverse content is sought and controversy is not avoided.”
It was through the opportunity of proposal-driven exhibitions and the gallery’s embrace of more experimental work that Fuentes’ "No. Title" came to be. Several months ago, Fuentes submitted a “vague proposal” to Herberger stating she would include images from her daily life, and they basically gave her free reign to explore the space.
As a graduate student, Allison Fuentes is featured as an ASU artist at Grant Street Studious. Fuentes used the Step Gallery space to create a series of pieces using primary colors coupled with interpretations of the human body. (Photo by Tynin Fries)What wound up filling the square gallery on the night of the opening reception surely led to several people wondering — as Fuentes anticipated — to “What the f--k? This isn’t what I expected; this isn’t art.” Initially, the reporter’s reaction was of the same vein.
In the southwestern corner of the gallery, the 1952 Russian film “Sadko” played on loop opposite another projection of a blue tinted still from the same film. Along the northern wall, a haiku (Sadko the hero / Leaves to find happiness / He returns in the end) was carved into gold vinyl underneath a convex image of a fish fashioned from the same gold vinyl. Roughly 40 metal folding chairs were spread out — seemingly at random — across the room.
“Sadko,” essentially, is the journey of the hero — who sets out to find the bird of happiness for the rather sad people of his home, Novgorod. Had the reporter arrived on time to the reception, he would have caught Fuentes’ lecture on the film and perhaps — though this is not likely — understood what made the exhibit “art.”
“The idea was to lecture about something out of left field,” she said. “Something the students could argue relevance on, which, as first year students, is one of the main topics.”
Fuentes hoped that students would just ask questions and make their own connections between the somewhat bizarre components of the exhibition. “It’s all about if they can just ask questions, like, why are there chairs?” she said.
Fuentes argued that “you can make a relationship between any two completely unrelated things, but obviously these things have been chosen and thought about and decisions have been made. I would just hope that any person would just consider how the imagery and objects in this room are communicating with each other.”
Fuentes stressed the importance of her art as “an opportunity to communicate with people that is, for me, more efficient than communicating with language.”
Still, the reporter was left uneasy about the whole affair. He just wasn’t sure what Fuentes was attempting to communicate. There seemed to be no meaningful connections to be drawn, no sense to be made of the objects in the room — and certainly no point to all the talk about Russian Formalism. He felt he possessed a liberal notion of what constituted “art,” but this was not it. It just didn’t seem like an end product.
The Grant Street Studio's Step Gallery features graduate Allison Fuentes with part two of her exhibit, "No. Title." Her pieces incorporate primary colors and the human body, which she portrays through photography, paintings and sculptures. (Photo by Tynin Fries)Fuentes even said so herself. “Though this is an end product because it’s here in the gallery — that’s the idea of here, the space — this isn’t really an end product, it’s just what’s here right now,” she said.
Unbeknownst to the reporter at the time, what he saw on the night of the opening reception was just part one of "No. Title" — and only one side of the truly talented, dynamic work of Fuentes.
Over the weekend, Fuentes informed the reporter that part two of the exhibit (what you see pictured) would open the following Thursday — a detail that never came up in the initial interview on the night of the opening reception.
In the ensuing exchange, the reporter learned that what he’d seen really wasn’t an end product; it was constructed in response to Fuentes’s knowledge that a group of freshmen art students would be in attendance. She turned the gallery into a “pretend lecture hall” for the night, and purposefully spoke of drawing connections between disparate objects and ideas.
The reporter had, as it seemed, fallen into the very game he thought himself to be above. Fuentes had, perhaps incidentally, presented him with a challenge to think outside his liberal, but ultimately restrictive definition of art — and he failed.
Amanda Mollindo, a photography senior, applauded Fuentes for her willingness to experiment, but the reporter was hesitant.
“I like that she sees art a lot more loosely than a lot of us,” she said. “She lets herself explore a lot, and she lets herself have a lot of fun, and I think that’s what makes it so successful. She asks questions that people don’t necessarily want to ask. She does her own thing.”
But as the weekend wore on, the reporter found himself considering the potential for a dynamic evolution within the gallery space as a key to understanding what art can be. He had, regrettably, made a harsh judgment based upon a single stage of evolution in "No. Title." There was more to it.
Fuentes’s work on part two had been in the conceptual stage for several months; however, after a long night, Fuentes woke early one morning and returned to the Step Gallery, transforming it into a studio, where she began the physical work on part two of "No. Title," inspired by her appreciation for sex and bright colors.
“Part of my process is having fun figuring out how I’m going to innovate what’s already in front of me,” she said of utilizing supplies (Styrofoam, paneling, etc.) recovered from the dumpster outside the gallery for use in part two.
The Grant Street Studio's Step Gallery features graduate Allison Fuentes with part two of her exhibit, "No. Title." Her pieces incorporate primary colors and the human body, which she portrays through photography, paintings and sculptures. (Photo by Tynin Fries)The mystery of what would be unveiled on Thursday, Sept. 11 inside the crisp white, four-walled box of the Step Gallery was almost unbearable for the reporter, and while her the bright colors of her paintings now adorn this page, it is simply not the same as experiencing the work in reality.
Please join the reporter at Step Gallery in realizing that your static idea of art is boring and is in desperate need of a Fuentes-style evolution.
You can visit the gallery Monday – Saturday, noon - 5 p.m.
Allison Fuentes’ "No. Title" runs until Sept. 13.
Reach the reporter at zachariah.webb@asu.edu or follow him on Twitter @zachariahkaylar.
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