Massive Canvas

All Together Now: Ingrid Calame (in striped shirt) leads her team of assistants on one of her industrial art installation tracings.

MMA’s latest stars Ingrid Calame and packs in enough for four whole shows.

By Paul Wilner

Thursday, October 28, 2010

The Monterey Museum of Art refuses to be ignored, setting its sights ever higher as it grows from a more-than-credible regional institution to a facility with legitimate claims to join the national art conversation.

On the heels of the recent Ansel Adams show, which marked the highest attendance in the museum’s 51-year history – and neatly bridging the gap between those who see Adams’ work as an iconic, sentimental treasure and those who view it as a more sophisticated piece of his genuine artistic legacy – the museum is now mounting what is perhaps its most ambitious fall season ever.

The new exhibition includes four elements: a site-specific work by Los Angeles-based artist Ingrid Calame, which marks the largest art installation in MMA’s history; prints by Hung Liu, a Chinese-American artist based in the Bay Area who explores ideas of femininity; Cabaret Calaveras: Dia de Los Muertes, papier mâché figures made by the Pedro Linares Family in Mexico City, to honor the Day of the Dead; and Miró, Matisse & Picasso: Celebrating Color and Line, a selection of works by the three modern masters.

Under different circumstances, each might be worthy of separate exhibitions. Taken as a whole, they serve as testimony to the vision of MMA Executive Director E. Michael Whittington and, most particularly, Chief Curator Marcelle Polednik, who has recruited new and surprising additions to an exhibition schedule that could easily be confined to the safety of seascapes.

Bringing in what marks Calame’s first solo museum exhibition in California is a major coup. Museum officials are understandably pumped but avoid saying it’s a major pivot from, say, the Adams show.

“It is and it isn’t,” Polednik says. “We do like to mix it up. It’s important not only to present works that audiences know and love, but current work that corresponds to, and even challenges in some ways, the rest of the collection.

“I’ve been talking with Ingrid about doing a project for the last three years, and this came together after she finished a series of works based on her residence at the Albright-Knox Gallery in Buffalo, N.Y., and was interested in trying a new project for a wall drawing.”

The installation, “Perry Street Projects Wading Pool, Buffalo, New York,” is a 38-by-23-foot wall drawing that will exist only for the life of the exhibition, after which it will be painted over. Based on Calame’s trademark tracings from a long-abandoned public wading pool, it’s accompanied by paintings of inventory numbers used by crane operators at a nearby steel plant.

Like her other works, which include re-tracings of skid marks from cars on the Indianapolis Speedway and graffiti by gang members near the Los Angeles River, the Buffalo project speaks to her mixed emotions about loss and mortality, and the growing mastery and self-challenging nature of her art.

“The tracings are the way I’ve always done them,” Calame says from her Echo Park studio. “But the numbers are different because they are representational, and my work has always been abstract.”

Her work has been compared to Jackson Pollock’s for its vibrancy and use of colors. Her use of assistants for the tracings is reminiscent in some ways of Andy Warhol’s Factory.

But the results are uniquely her own, and evolving.

“I was working in ArcelorMittal Steel, which was previously Bethlehem Steel, in an old building,” she says. “I traced the numbers they used to keep track of the rolls of steel. It’s an era that was fading, like the steel mills themselves.”

Calame says seeing the numbers reminded her of “my dad, a gym teacher, who used to make signs for his students. You wouldn’t do that now – it’d all be computers.

“When I go back into the tracing, though, it goes into another sphere, which has to do with my own responses, and how the shapes resonate with me, rather than just being about a steel mill.”

Calame, who’s visited Monterey only briefly in the past, hopes to see more of “the ocean” while here for the opening, but has no plans to incorporate the local landscape into her work. (The Indianapolis Speedway project morphed after she was originally approached for a piece on forests.)

“I love nature, but there’s nothing I take from it for my work,” she laughs. “I wouldn’t trace anything in nature. It’s too beautiful already. I’m more interested in taking on things that are overlooked, or yucky.”