The month of August has been a collection of short summer showings, at least for 1122 Outside, a backyard gallery in the SE Tabor neighborhood of Portland, OR.
Substituting the traditional white walled cube for a fenced in lot, this alternative gallery sits behind the house of poets and educators Jen Denrow and Jesse Morse. As a living, activated space co-run by Denrow and her cousin Lauren Wallig, a backyard becomes an invitation for artists to be imaginationists.
Steadfast in our scheming, ahuva s. zaslavsky and I met weekly, collaborating together for the first time, under the fire of a fast approaching deadline, eager to respond to the site specific nature of a gallery lined with trees, between a chicken-less coop, fire pit, shed, and a covered carport.
As two makers with shared mediums, whose interdisciplinary work spans writing, printmaking, ceramics and more, our forms and concepts compliment one another in repeating and twisting tubular forms.
At the bottom of a shared list; a living document of ideas titled, TUBES, I wrote the word: rigmarole and the question, is this a real word?
I want to spell rigmarole: rig-a-marole, but Google says there is only one a.
At the opening of LULL, the two-person exhibition by Jenn Sova and Sarah Umles, the first to debut in the gallery’s summer series of showings*, Denrow asked me how do you say this word?
Rig-uh-muh-role or Rig-muh-rouwl?
rigmarole (n.)
"a long, rambling discourse; incoherent harangue," 1736, apparently from an altered, Kentish colloquial survival of ragman roll "long list, roster, or catalogue" (c. 1500). The origins of this are in Middle English rageman "document recording accusations or offenses," also "an accuser" (late 13c.).Aug 25, 2021
If you deep dive into the Did You Know section of the online Merriam Webster dictionary there are disputes over the origin and meaning of rigmarole.
Is it the colloquial survival of ‘ragman roll’ or a term referring to record keeping and taxation by a man named Ragimunde or is it a medieval game of verse—can it be all of the above?
For me personally, rigmarole is an interest in the possibilities embedded in miscommunication: the roundabouts, the meanders, the tangents, the lost in thoughts…where legible turns illegible and back again. Like the history of a word having so many conflicting meanings, rigmarole in and of itself documents what remains and gets lost over time.
In working together, ahuva and I noticed our collaborations and ways of making as their own rigmaroles: ping pong poetry, late night and early morning texts, and skill swapping—stretching. Making by way of a persistent trial and error; an insistence on making something work even when it feels as if the universe is taunting the question: how bad do you want this?
Although ping pong poetry is not a recognized category of writing, it should be. A dance of words across screens is not that unlike a ball crossing over a net, thrown back at you like a question asks for an answer.
“i edited our ping pong poem. what do you think?”
In a span of three weeks, ahuva and I bounced words back and forth, from our texts to our shared google doc to letters molded in clay, fired in kilns, printed type to paper and scribbled and scratched by hand until the words minced together.
Spanning five minutes, our collective writing became a three part poem stamped in clay; a stop motion animation narrated by Ash Good.
The video was made with the intention of being viewed in the conversation room, a retrofitted one person theatre attached to the back of a decommissioned chicken-less coop (initially constructed by time-based light artist Pam Hadley).
This is one in a series of three collaborative projects created for our summer showing.
The writing room, activating the shed two steps to the right of the one person theatre, is an interactive installation for visitors to create their own words in response to one another.
Entering the rust, clay colored room, two toned ceramic letters (an entire alphabet both capital and lowercase) hung in organized rows, sparkling in the filtered daylight. The walls became lined notebook pages with words nestled on shelves, appearing and disappearing. Sometimes reading:
#Taylor Swift was here
move come closer pop
ponder wonder
i love you mom and dad
lenny slays!
Uli & Alice
BUNNY
ok honey
Through the duration of the show, ‘sex’ changed to ‘sexy gurl’, with the y laying sideways, ‘fuck you’ became ‘freaky’ then ‘shaky.’ Nonsense words—orphaned letters, rearranged, spelled ‘go fiddle or ‘sucking…….out…..chomp’ split between three shelves.
Even by means of distant viewers of documentation photos, I received requests for words to be written.
If possible, will you add “deciduous” to one of the lines on the wall?
These requests accompanied emailed back stories:
When I was 41, I was reading The New Yorker Magazine. I was impressed by word combinations and how there were times when reading the words abruptly stopped me in my mind in its tracks.
The word DECIDUOUS did that to me. It made me think that if I had a gravestone or urn, just say, I’d ask for “she was as if deciduous” written on it.
I felt (feel) like a tree that stays the same: TREE, but periodically I shed things/ideas and new ones sprout. I “leaf” as I age, so to speak.
As a site specific installation situated outside, between a very tall tree and several short trees, the exhibition rigmarole is inherently ephemeral. A seasonal garden of sorts.
Our rambling garden greets visitors upon arrival to the right of the gated entrance. Here, my slipcast ceramic pipes suspend from underneath ahuva’s circular ceiling centerpieces (installed asymetrically) creating dimensional floating line drawings from different vantage points. Connected, but not.
In this artificial wonderland, ceramic pipes joined to ducting tubes, ask questions about the nature of systems closed, knotted, and open. Lining the floor, walls, and flirting with the foliage peeking through the cracks between the roof and the wall. Pipes deliver and receive as conductors; they flow all sorts of materials to both of their ends. But what happens when the pipe clogs?
In my experience, language, like plumbing infrastructures inevitably get clogged, systems unnoticed, until they break—reminding me that communication also requires routine maintenance.
rigmarole will be on view through Saturday, August 26th with open hours from 4-6pm.
Our closing reception will be
Friday, August 25th from 4-8pm
with an artist talk at 6pm.
And thanks to Caitlin Taber, if you couldn’t make the artist talk, you can view the recording below.
*Edit 8/28/23: Guava, a show with Bunny Presse was actually the first of the short summer of showings.