Douglas Weathersby's art at the ICA

Weathersby makes clean sweep with ICA projects
By Joanne Silver/Visual Arts
Friday, December 12, 2003

In boiler rooms and storage sheds, basements and even galleries, Douglas Weathersby turns light and shadow and dust into mesmerizing works of art. The 31-year-old Malden resident, who ventured into caves in Alabama as a Boy Scout, now finds his most fascinating explorations inspired by the detritus of daily life.

     As the winner of the Institute of Contemporary Art's 2003 Artist Prize, Weathersby spent a large part of the summer rummaging around the museum's quirky Boylston Street building, searching for places to create his ephemeral installations. Part cleaning project and part installation art, these subtle interventions are now sprinkled about the building, where they are on view until Jan. 4.

``Dust and shadow are things we don't necessarily pay that much attention to,'' Weathersby said one afternoon at the ICA. ``But they are some of the basic elements of how we perceive the world.''

     He stopped as the elevator door opened at the rear of the main floor, struck by the green glow that echoed the lime-green light of the ``up'' arrow. ``How we understand a thing is completely contingent on where we're standing,'' he mused.

     The artist, who earned his master's from Mass College of Art, seeks out places where revelations might just unfold to the rhythmic beat of his cleaning efforts. Because such labors are usually destined for oblivion, Weathersby sometimes employs video and still photography to preserve these strangely magical events. Debris being whisked off a wall becomes a blizzard of white on a red linoleum sea in one of the BK Boiler Room Projects he includes on the DVD ``Environmental Services: Projects for TV by Douglas Weathersby,'' released this fall. At the ICA, a form for prospective customers to fill out allows clients to select from a range of documentation possibilities in conjunction with the artist's cleaning and repair services.

     Downstairs, near shelves of paint cans in the museum's workroom, a slop sink bears the traces of Weathersby's presence.

     ``I came into this piece thinking, `I don't know what I'm going to do today. Maybe I'll just clean the sink,' '' he said. And for six hours, he scrubbed, until gray grime gave way to white porcelain - except where the artist left the filmy residue to echo the shadow of the sink's faucet. It takes a minute to realize that the shape is, in fact, substance, not merely a play of light and dark.

     Time and memory figure prominently in Weathersby's work, as sculpted dust assumes the contours of objects no longer present. In the back staircase, for example, swept-up grime forms the ghostly silhouette of a bicycle often parked in the building's alleyway entry. The slow and deliberate strokes of Weathersby's brushes and brooms provide the meter of what are often poetic meditations on scenes from the past. A cobwebby light duct glimpsed from below hints at years of forgotten history.

     A luminous burst of swirling white in an empty red-and-yellow chamber records the artist cleaning out his mother's storage shed in Asheville, N.C. With no people in sight, the room is inhabited by flickering movements of dust and sunlight. ``All this stuff is about an immateriality, a story, something you saw that's not there,'' Weathersby said of the projects he has taped.

     Trained in such mainstream media as painting and printmaking, he said, ``I have always been into process.'' Perhaps having a mother who is an art therapist led him to think of art more as a journey than an object. Learning meditation in his 20s nudged him further in this direction.

     Sweeping, dusting, spraying glass cleaner and wiping it off have allowed Weathersby to examine ordinary corners of the world more closely than others might, and to notice what layers of dirt might have obscured.