Anyone who’s ever been to Corey Daniels Gallery in Wells knows this is not your usual exhibition space. This rambling warren of rooms is perpetually in motion, as Daniels shifts around his enormous collection of paintings, sculptures, photography, folk art, furniture and objects to create new and fascinating dialogues among them. It’s also huge and, with so much to see, can be a bit overwhelming visually. With the opening of his basement exhibition space – until now what he calls a “catch-all” room – that feeling of overload takes another leap – or, more accurately perhaps, a descent.

The pleasure of the space is not so much the actual contents, though of course there are stunning works here. Rather, it is the joy of seeing Daniels’ febrile mind at work and witnessing the way he explodes art hierarchies by juxtaposing things as disparate as Jung Hur’s keyhole paintings, William Zingaro’s industrial metal sculptures, a board covered in Lucky Strike cigarette logos and molds for making machine parts used in the production of paper. I dare anyone to emerge from this space with their distinct demarcations between what is and is not “art” still intact. Categorization here becomes not just wholly beside the point, but totally irrelevant.

Poured concrete walls define a dimly lit room where individual pieces are picked out of the darkness by spotlights, ensuring that drama is built into the experience. Immediately after descending the steps, we are confronted by a Zingaro sculpture of three long horizontal metal beams precariously balanced on a metal obelisk, the beams seeming as though they could rotate independently of each other to form different configurations. Behind it is an enormous canvas (probably eight feet tall) of a ball of twine or yarn that appears to be whirling within a field of the Korean painter’s signature keyhole motifs. To the left on the floor is a Boyan Moskov ceramic jar.

Though the Moskov piece is tiny in comparison to the Zingaro sculpture and Hur painting, it somehow takes on a formidable presence that seems to anchor the whole composition. It grounds and stabilizes the implied movement of the other two works. I closed one eye and put my hand up to block out the Moskov piece and, as I suspected, the Hur and Zangaro suddenly seemed about to spin dangerously out of control.

Daniels assembled the objects in the space with the help of collaborator Keith Taylor, who, among other things, cobbled together a collection of vintage wooden machine molds from Fraser Papers – a mill in Madawaska that opened in 1925 and today is part of the Twin Rivers Paper Company complex there – into a kind of installation sculpture under the stairs.

Daniels’ own creativity is on view just across from this: a chalk “painting” on an antique school chalkboard made of actual slate. But also apparent is Daniels’ iconoclastic sense of humor taking shape on the other side of the stair as an antique glass display case into which he inserted a rusty old metal lawn chair. It is an intriguing, if odd, pairing of objects that, taken individually, would barely register. Together, however, they are transformed into sculpture, accruing a sense of mystery and perplexity that stops us in our tracks.

There are pieces by anonymous artists (a spectacular wavy conical shape made of plywood and canvas stretched over an armature), functional objects like the wooden molds never intended as “art,” accomplished works of painting and sculpture (by Zingaro, Hur, Daniels and Joshua Leland Yurges), and strange undefinable things such as the board covered in Lucky Strike logos nonchalantly propped up against a wall. To Daniels’ perspicacious eye, it all has an inherent artistic value. We can tell that, as a longtime antiques dealer, he’s a quick study, able to size up – and innately perceive – a thing’s allure, though it may be deemed junk by many another.

There is also a wonderful feel for materials and the way they work together in space. Take Yurges’ lath “painting,” an image of a box at close range created entirely with thin strips of wood found behind plaster walls in historic homes. The laths comprising the “exterior” of the box are black, while the “interior” laths are a natural wood color. It’s a super cool illusion that makes us feel like we can jump into the box and close the lid over our head.

This work is interesting in its own right. But it is within sight of the display case containing the metal lawn chair and the wooden machine molds. The weathered, worn textures of the nearby objects – the glass and chipped paint of the display case, the rusted metal of the chair, the redolent luster of the wood molds, which have absorbed the body oils of their handlers over a century – all conspire to convey a sense of time passing, things degrading with age. They also trigger a tension (especially as they are within sightlines of Zingaro’s metal sculpture on the obelisk) between antique and modern, natural and manufactured, what is created and what has been discarded.

How’s that for the summoning a whole lot of emotional and physical content simply by juxtaposing forms that are both commercial and artistically minded? Daniels’ process is utterly experimental and intuitive, yet you cannot really call the results the least bit random. And all the while we are surrounded by the damp chill of the basement, a space that is often a repository for the things we no longer need, the keeper of old identities and the musty guardian of memory.

Jorge S. Arango has written about art, design and architecture for over 35 years. He lives in Portland. He can be reached at: jorge@jsarango.com 

Copy the Story Link