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Brick by brick

BOB KEYES

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John Patriquin/ Staff Photographer: Tuesday, March,31, 2009. Artist Wade Kavanaugh stands by his fake brick art display at the Portland Museum of Art.

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Staff Writer

ORTLAND — Wade Kavanaugh is 30 years old, born long after the post-war baby boom.

In his world, gypsum board or drywall -- commonly known in the trades as Sheetrock -- has been the building material of choice, fueling America's housing boom.

Before drywall became popular, laborers constructed plaster walls. The painstaking task required nailing thousands of wooden laths to ceilings and walls, and coating them with layers of wet plaster.

Wartime construction demanded more efficiency, and wallboard offered a fast and cheap solution. It's ubiquitous now, but was never meant to be that way. The assumption after the war was that builders would return to plaster, which offered more integrity and aesthetics than wallboard.

But post-war builders appreciated the ability to quickly hang walls of Sheetrock, and it served well America's modernist architectural trends, which favored right angles and flat surfaces at the expense of curved walls and fancy moldings.

For someone like Kavanaugh, wallboard is all he's ever really known, at least in a practical sense.

''Sheetrock is what fundamentally informs our perception of interior space,'' Kavanaugh observes.

Wallboard is Kavanaugh's material of choice for his sprawling art installations, the latest of which is on view in the main gallery of the Portland Museum of Art and its 2009 Biennial exhibition.

While the exhibition celebrates range and diversity in Maine contemporary art, Kavanaugh is the star. Last week, he walked home from the opening-night reception pocketing a $4,000 check, his reward for winning the William E. and Helen T. Thon Jurors Prize.

His massive installation, ''Falsework,'' comprises about 10,000 bricks of Sheetrock. Each brick is made from five boards, cut in the shape and size of an actual brick.

He uses his bricks as building blocks, constructing a wall and wide mass that runs the length of the gallery, supported internally by wooden framework. It reaches to the ceiling at one point, caves in toward the middle and then tumbles out the back, with bricks spilling out onto the floor like water cascading down a drop in the river.

As viewers, we are left with a sense of chaos, as if the wall has been shaken by an earthquake or otherwise compromised. Instead of order, we have ruin. Instead of straight lines and right angles, we have a flow.

SHEETROCK AS METAPHOR

Kavanaugh, who was born in Portland, grew up in Winthrop, graduated from Bowdoin College in 2001 and now lives in Brunswick and Brooklyn, N.Y., encourages people to consider his piece in the context of America's housing boom and bust.

At least to some degree, his installation suggests that Sheetrock stands as a metaphor for America's current economic crisis.

If it's true that the unbridled growth and sprawl of the housing market is at the root of the financial mess that we face today, then Sheetrock serves as a worthy symbol for the downfall. That may be especially true when one considers that 17 percent of drywall is discarded as waste, or sometimes recycled, because of cutouts for windows and doors.

Thus his title for the installation, ''Falsework'': much of this country's wealth was based on a false economy, propped up by an artificial housing boom, made possible by the convenience, cost and ready availability of Sheetrock.

This is the third time Kavanaugh has used his bricks for such an installation. The first time was last fall in Seattle, at Suyama Space. He called his piece ''Regrade.''

For that installation, he included a functional path, running through the installation. In ''Falsework'' at the PMA, visitors navigate around it.

Before the PMA exhibition opened, he showed a version of ''Falsework'' using these same bricks at Cynthia-Reeves, a Chelsea gallery in New York.

He got the idea for working with Sheetrock bricks in 2007, when he used wood and drywall at the Coleman Burke Gallery in Brunswick. Most of that installation involved Kavanaugh's construction of the framework for angled walls that bisected the mill gallery. Within the walls, he stacked bricks.

At the time, the bricks accented the overall piece, and were not the focus.

But they quickly became his obsession, as Kavanaugh launched a deep investigation into the material that has resulted in his showing versions of his piece across the country.

His success required him to master something a logistical trick. To move 10,000 bricks across the country from Maine to Washington, he built 16 wooden crates, on casters.

Each installation requires a major effort simply to move the bricks from one location to the next -- never mind the effort required to build the actual piece.

'NEVER TWICE THE SAME'

But scale seems to not be an issue for Kavanaugh. The grander, the better.

He's a fan of Robert Smithson, who made his name creating massive land-art projects in the natural environment. Another installation artist, Robert Irwin, also influences Kavanaugh in his investigation of light and space and visual perception.

Irwin said, ''Always changing, never twice the same,'' and that seems to be Kavanaugh's motto as well. Each time he installs his piece, it's different, reflecting the unique features and feel of each gallery.

It must be so, he said. Each space is different.

At the PMA, he is most interested in how people move through the gallery, and how they interact with the piece, both physically and intellectually. He has no preconceived hopes or desires about the outcome of ''Falsework'' beyond simply engaging people on some level.

''Whatever they do in there, they will move through the artwork. I think that's pretty cool,'' he said.

Susan Danly, curator of contemporary art at the museum, appreciates both the scale and subtlety of Kavanaugh's work. She likes that it explores volume and space with energy.

''Falsework'' feels solid and fragile at the same time, and encourages visitors to engage in the physical space of the gallery in a completely different manner than they might have in the past, she said.

''What I find wonderful about his work is the way in which he uses these mundane materials to suggest bigger ideas about form and content,'' Danly said. ''I love that the 'bricks' undulate in a wonderful way that suggests water to me. He defies the nature of the material, which normally would be hammered on the wall and flat. But it's not. It's got curves to it, and it's got a sense of motion.''

Staff Writer Bob Keyes can be contacted at 791-6457 or at:

bkeyes@pressherald.com