RICH HARRINGTON: AUTOBIOGRAPHY IN FOUND IMAGE

At the opening of Rich Harrington’s currently running show, This is the way we play and learn, at Anthony Brunelli Fine Arts, the SUNY Broome art professor wore a button-down shirt patterned with tiny images of Charlie Brown and Linus, underneath a vest, topped off with a red bowtie that matched the red stripe on his fedora. Aside from making it glaringly obvious who was the artist in the room, the outfit perfectly demonstrated his keen sense of the interdependence between the parts and the whole so evident in his art.

The works are numbered few, but sized large, some of them requiring one to stand at the opposite wall to get a good look. For example, “Here We Are” is a single work made up of four blown-up pieces from an old board game called “Go to the Head of the Class.” Each giant game piece depicts the smiling bust of a Dick & Jane-style character with its role scrawled across its chest: Daddy, Brother, Sis, Butch.

Not a single image in this show was invented by Rich: all are found images from decades-old sources, manipulated with the intent to “articulate a world which has always existed, but was not acknowledged or represented,” he writes in the show’s statement. The tone is not overtly critical, nor nostalgic, but searching. It is kitschy and ironic in the pop-art tradition, but Rich is building with his art not an exposé, but a mirror. His art glares outward upon society in order to look back inward at the artist.

This show, and much of his work, examines gender propaganda and gay politics, particularly “the origins of identity formation in the context of family, school, and play.” The reason so much of his imagery is from the ‘60s and ‘70s, is that that culture was the backdrop of the formation of his own identity. “What I’m doing is I’m recontextualizing these things - taking them out of the original context, putting them into a new context that included me back then - but it didn’t, do you know what I mean? So it’s not like I’m rewriting my childhood. But I’m revisiting it.”

As a gay kid born in the postwar period, Rich grew to be in tune with the dichotomy of the visible and hidden worlds. “For somebody who grew up feeling invisible, this is pretty visible,” he says, gesturing to the walls of the gallery. “And I think inside that’s always what I wanted. And I’ve wanted to feel like I belonged - I never felt like I belonged! I never, you know... harassed in school, I was never into what other boys were into.” The intense, overbearing size of the pieces speaks to the experience of the being unable to escape that reality.

Rich grew up in Endwell, a place he identifies by its placelessness: “It’s not a town, it’s not a city: it’s a hamlet!” His father was an IBM executive, and his mother, who had studied art, stayed home to raise Rich and his three siblings. He was a white child of a middle class family (a descendant of the Mayflower) living in Upstate New York in the booming age of IBM. His life would have appeared to be as close the American Dream as one can get.

While he was bullied at school, he emphasizes the breadth of the support he received from his parents. “My parents were extremely encouraging, you know, from the art standpoint. When I used to doodle on the programs in church, they encouraged it the whole time.” His mother has now passed away, but his dad, who is 90, continues to offer undying support to Rich’s art, even though at the beginning, “he didn’t really get it.”

Rich and his family used to take trips to Vermont, where he would paint rural scenes. He was trained in traditional media: charcoal, pencil, and pen and ink. Some older work consists of landscapes in watercolor and pastel, and household items in oil monoprint. While the look of these is miles from his more recent projects, it has all come out of the same interest in the return to one’s memories. “Those were the places, the exterior places that I occupied. This is all about the interior spaces.”

Rich earned his BFA in Illustration at Syracuse University, and his MFA in Painting at Maryland Institute College of Art. During grad school, a “creative dead zone” led to an artistic turning point. “I was embarrassed because everybody around me was just going crazy, and I was doing some really awful work. I was into old midcentury modern stuff: the culture, pop culture, toys and stuff, but I couldn’t do anything with it.” Then a friend of his mother’s gave him a Sears catalogue, in which he came across a page with rows and rows of women wearing hats. He cut them out, and then found another page with men wearing hats, then little girls, then little boys, which eventually became a gridded collage - and the beginning of the examination of the family unit, which shaped so much of his later work.

Because his process is so shaped by found images, the Sears catalogue is not the only book that has changed the course of his work. “Back in the mid-‘90s I was in the bookstore in Owego, and I was at the end of one of the rows of books, and I tripped on something - there was, like, a crate with a book on it. And I tripped on it and the book fell over, and the book was called The Rainbow Dictionary, from 1947, and it became my bible and the source of all the subsequent work.”

“Look-Say,” which is the largest piece currently displayed, takes all of its images from The Rainbow Dictionary. It consists of a grid of giant flashcards made of board. On the left, words like pansy, fruit, and queen are next to images of a flower, a fruit bowl, and a woman in a crown - while on the right, the same words all appear next to the repeated image of a smiling, dot-eyed young boy.

Repetition is a defining element of Rich’s work, which, he reflects, is related to his artistic interest in the way the world teaches us. “That’s how we learned in school: say it, repeat it, and the more you repeat something, you learn it. Well, it’s the same thing with propaganda, you know. You tell somebody something long enough, they start to believe it, whether it’s true or not.” While his imagery is entirely vintage, his process moves ahead with new technologies. “I’m getting much more into motion and projection and graphics and stuff like that. My dad was an engineer, my mother was an art major, and I’m half of both of them,” he says, drawing a line down the center of his body with his hand.

He describes his work as process-intensive. The newest piece displayed in the show is titled “The Perfect Fun Starter for Every Party.” It divides up the pattern of a classic Twister board into squares, on which images of different old-school items are sprawled with the appearance of randomness, as if they had fallen out of the invisible players’ pockets. The process of tracing and resizing images to life-size involved a wealth of behind-the-scenes tinkering on an ipad and computer. The projector is the handy tool behind the blown-up images. Before projecting an image, he may further degrade the work to create a more aged look. Once the image is projected, he hand-paints it in tiny detail in order to preserve every tiny imperfection.

As an adjunct professor at SUNY Broome, his goal is to help his students with such technical skills that they will need to achieve their own visions as artists. “If we have time we bring in the fourth dimension, which is time. We do sight-specific outdoor installations around Roberson. I show them a ton of artists’ work, we talk a lot, we interact; it’s very hands-on.” With the offbeat exhibits at the Roberson, and the vast variety available on the internet, he is able to open up to them the possibilities of art beyond representation.

Rich is now pushing his own work even deeper in the direction of multimedia and technology. Currently, he’s working on a piece with local artist Nick Rubenstein. It involves voice recordings from The Language Master Series, which used to be used in schools for speech therapy, along with projections of corresponding index cards, and video of a mouth speaking the words out of time. This project is in the works to be revealed at November’s First Friday Art Walk.

This is the way we play and learn remains on display through June 25th. The gallery is open to the public every Saturday, and of course First Friday, and private viewings can be arranged by contacting the gallery. You can also view his work at rsharrington.com.