by Eva Dameron
Daily Lobo
Rob Kellar glorifies the junkyard.
His paintings are at Bivouac Artspace through Feb. 26. This is Kellar's first art show.
The series, "Natural Post Industrial," is a conglomeration of scraps. He puts together small wood panels he finds in the desert to form one huge board. Then he collects rusted pieces of metal from around town and glues them to the bottom half of the painting. He also throws his photographs of old highway equipment into the mix. Then he paints over them with oils. He also makes his own frames out of metal and wood. One frame is made out of rows of nails.
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The outcome is heavy, industrial, dark, slightly silhouetted.
And Kellar contrasts this with an airy thin sky in twilight. They're painted with yellows and faded pinks blending into white. The sky and foreground work beautifully off each other.
"I did that on purpose," he said. "I definitely want that kind of contrast."
He compared junkyard ruins to the Pyramids of Giza - one of the world's Seven Wonders.
"It's a bunch of dead monuments," Kellar said. "They used to hold so much power, and now they're so insignificant and falling back into the earth."
In some of his works, giant butterflies rise from the trash like Christ rising from the dead. He decorates the butterflies with metal scraps to show how creatures absorb our waste and are able to live with it.
The butterflies hover in the center with simple bold patches of paint. Because the butterflies aren't weighed down with detail, they're more for statement, instead of for the aesthetic pleasure we normally associate them with.
One piece, called "Sun Gods," stands out from the series. It's Mayan pyramids with imaginary sun gods shining above them. He made the gods out of two four-barrel carburetors, which reminded him of Mayan art for some reason, he said.
"I combined modern with ancient times - these different mechanical parts with these ancient monuments or ideas," Kellar said.
All the elements in his paintings - the butterflies, twilight sky, rusting metal - speak to the viewer of change or transition. He paints it in a positive mind-set. No paranoia.
It's a good show for the hopeless because hope flies out of the ruins. The show is accepting of the fact that everything comes to an end, but in the end is a beginning.
It's a good idea to see the show right before the sun sets because Bivouac Artspace sits in a broken-down area of town that looks like it could soon turn into a junkyard itself. When you leave the gallery it'll seem like you're walking through one of his paintings.
