arts

The Mausoleum Project

by Diane Daly

ven if you don’t know good acrylics from nail enamel, you may still feel stirred by the brush strokes of Matt Cotten. His art, after all, can be so accessible it doesn’t seem like art at all. The illuminated images of ancestors passed that make up his Mausoleum Project, funded annually by TPAC to haunt the All Souls Procession, look lively enough to sing a sad song or swindle a bourbon out of you. The puppets he creates as a member of Tucson Puppet Works do sing their share of songs (in Cotten’s throaty baritone), while drinking that bourbon. Such is the candor of effective public art: whether you’re receptive or preoccupied, you can’t be near these explosions of foam or wood panel and just ignore them in your beeline for the baked brie and Bordeaux. They brood brightly and heckle for your attention, and they get it.

But stand for a while before Stories from the Homefront, Cotten’s series currently on display at Platform Gallery, and the drama so forthright in his other work will materialize in greater depth.

“Puppetry requires community. Painting requires privacy. And the Mausoleum installations bridge that gap,” Cotten explains. The Mausoleum Project includes both life-size cutout wood figures made by Cotten and ink-on-Duralar portraits made by his students at the University of Arizona. Poseable screens and lights thrust the installations at passing viewers as they parade in honor of the dead. “The Mausoleum Project is like theater,” he continues carefully, pulling off his crocheted hat and causing his hair to spike up at an angle like a tipping agave. “Even though there’s a serenity, it has to be more like theater. Big, lit up from behind. Glowing.”

We aren’t looking at the Mausoleum installations as we speak of them, though like everyone who passes through the neighborhood where they are stored, I can visualize them perched as usual on Sixth Street Studios’ cement dock turned stage, the ink figures suspending the crumbled parking lot in grim regard. No, instead Cotten and I are standing a mere three blocks but many levels of subtlety away from that warehouse, contemplating his Homefront series at Platform. He gestures with a broad arm toward all seven of his paintings on the gallery’s stark white walls, and slowly declares them a tribute to photography. “Like the Mausoleum Project,” he says, “these are a reference to the love and attachment we have to photographs, and how photographs possess the power of memory.”

Cotten says that since the death of his father in 2003, photographs have helped him define himself within a lineage. The photographs on which the Homefront series are based do not depict Cotten’s ancestors, however. Some, as he reveals in an artist statement posted at the gallery, he dug out of a dumpster while traveling in Bulgaria. Others are well-known: Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “depressed men”, in Cotten’s words, are the basis of Cotten’s “Boston Commons ‘47”. Clearly, the use of strangers’ memories instead of his own allows Cotten to isolate the series from the nostalgia he says is not his intention.

But if nostalgia is the longing of the present self for the past self, that is the only link between past and present that Cotten does not indulge here. As its title suggests, Stories from the Homefront introduces the viewer to people who looked lonesome in their photographs, and whose longings Cotten both perceived and invented, much as we bury the dead with items we believe they desire. The figures he portrays are presented with their gestures of heartache not only visible, but presented alongside bolder layers illustrating Cotten’s fantasy of their yearnings and fears. A wistful-looking little girl contemplates her father’s Medal of Honor on a canvas spattered with red and pink hearts, while above her hovers a gnomelike imaginary friend in a black cloak and hood. In “Confessional,” a worn image of a Catholic confession booth is covered by a more freshly painted woman seen from the rear, partially unclothed. “Her husband is off at war,” Cotten translates, and the tone of his words is sheepish but his images are less so. Bright red flames float below her to signify damnation, and yellow symbols float above indicating ascension. At the mouth of the confessional, in a play on language Cotten seems to enjoy, waits a little bird. “You know,” he grins, “carrier of secrets.”

Layers are the linchpin of Cotten’s work. Utilizing the level of attention only afforded in a gallery setting, he points out and names “different kinds of mark-making, paint applications, removing, sanding, scraping” on each piece. He’ll work for months on each series, he says, so that multiple, distinct paintings peek out beneath the surface of each work. The resulting texture “gives a sense of history to the painting itself.” And it is in there, in scrawls of crayon between the layers of pencil and graphite, that Cotten lets his own life flash in. Some of these childish marks are drawn by Cotten at his most playful; others by his preschool-aged daughter, and not necessarily with his consent.

“When I was in college I used to leave paintings out in the rain, to expose them to that natural process. Now,” he smiles, “she is that process.”

Matt Cotten’s series, Stories from the Homefront, is on display at Platform Gallery until January 27th. Platform Gallery: 439 N 6th Ave., 520.882.3886. Gallery Hours: 11 am to 5 pm Tuesday through Saturday. Closed on Sunday and Monday.