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NEWSPAPER HOUSE, the center piece of Joan Backes' multimedia art exhibition, reveals little on its outside about how wondrous, even enchanted, it is inside.
In form, it is a simple cube. Its exterior is a patchwork of the most humble of materials, pages from newspapers gathered from the world. The pages have been carefully folded into small, three inch square shingles. There are no doors on the house, only a black, draped curtain at its front, another at its rear. From an inspection carried out by walking around the dwelling, Newspaper House might have the appearance of a structure erected by some ingenious lone wolf, maybe one of those crazies who squat beneath the freeway bridges, or an outsider artist living deep in a woods, withdrawn from society.
There is something else striking about Newspaper House. It is so compact that by comparison, even the smallest New York apartment might seem rambling. In its outside measurements, it is a mere 8 feet wide; 9 feet, 10 inches deep, and 7 feet high. One might wonder: Could anyone really inhabit such a tiny dwelling?
As eccentric, compressed and squat as Newspaper House is on its outside, it may be magical. Just as Alice found her world becoming "curiouser and curiouser" after falling through the rabbit hole, most interlopers are likely to experience wonderments upon slipping back the curtain and entering.
The first great surprise is that the house's inner sanctum, despite its contracted dimensions, does not feel claustrophobic. On the contrary, it seems almost open-ended. That is because almost from the instant of entering the inky atmosphere, one is transported to other worlds. Rather like a natural history museum created for lilliputians, there are small windows, dioramas and peepholes everywhere, recessed into its satin black walls. Each of the glassed-in proscenia reveals sights and quiet dramas that are breathtaking in beauty and strangeness.
One of the dioramas, for example, presents two actual specimens from nature, a pearlescent wasp nest so tiny it must have been home to but a single occupant, and also a curiously balled-up snakeskin that its owner shed and left behind after passing through a wire fence. It is doubtful Tiffany's window ever showcased two baubles with quite the fascination of these found specimens.
EVERY BIT AS HAUNTING is a scene revealed through a small window. Standing alone, appearing like a ghost in a landscape of barrenness, is a single elm. The tree is presented with about the same theatricality the Louvre might employ in displaying the rarest of its paintings, a Leonardo. There is a chilling irony here. Twenty or thirty years ago, in Milwaukee as well as in many cities across the country, most of us only had to peer through our living-room windows to see elms up and down the street. They are gone now, of course, victims of some hungry insect that foresters say was introduced to the US through the importation of cheap firewood from Asia
There is more in Newspaper House: a window looking out on a quintet of plovers, once common shorebirds, but now a species whose survival is threatened because of man's ever-greater incursions on their habitat: a diorama presenting a corps de ballet of Karner Blue butterflies, another endangered species, fluttering in starlit air like tiny chips of lapis lazuli; a small, split-screen slideshow presenting creations from popular culture like Road Runner on one side and, on the other, birds and animals that have become extinct since they were recorded by John James Audubon and other artists; and more, and more....
Newspaper House is one of a half dozen houses that Backes, an installation artist and painter, has created in recent years in places as scattered as Chicago, Los Angeles, Thailand and Nova Scotia. Different building materials and architectural styles have been used for each house, but all the structures, in varying ways, make statements about man's relationship to the natural world.
Backes does not pretend to be a scientist or credentialed environmentalist. She is an artist first and foremost. It could be ventured, though, that she is also an enchantress. She makes us see, re-see or see with keener clarity, that to which we pay too little notice.
Arrayed all around Newspaper House as part of the exhibition, are numerous other works that take us ever deeper into Backes' enchanted woods: a mesmerizing video that, in 11 minutes, distills a year in the life of an oak tree; 15 large, X-ray-like photographs of tree sections; and also nearly a dozen paintings of tree sections that, in manner, not only suggest scrupulously rendered dendrological recordings, but also canvases documenting such art tendencies from the last 50 or 60 years as abstract expressionism, photo-realism and post-minimalism.
The trees that are the subjects of Backes photographs and paintings -- birches, oaks, palms and others -- may seem prevalent today. But by inconicizing them as rare objects -- as works of art objects befitting museum walls -- the artist may be asking a question of urgency: What if, like the elm, these trees should vanish from our lives almost overnight? We would then have to be content with mere replications -- Backes' paintings and photographs as well as the visual records produced by other artists and documenters.
- Dean Jensen
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