NEWFANE — Bricolage is the construction or creation from a diverse range of available things - something constructed or created from what is at hand.
The word suggests collage, the medium of Jim Tober's artwork, while Claude Lévi-Strauss introduced the word in anthropology, the disciplinary background of Carol Hendrickson.
The Crowell Gallery, 23 West St., is showing the work of these two educators, whose love of creative reconstruction has coexisted with a life in academia and comes to the fore in their combined exhibit in January.
Hendrickson is professor emerita of anthropology at Marlboro College. During her teaching career, she used her college art training to encourage students to draw as well as write as part of field research. This work with students led her to keep extensive visual field notes documenting her own travels and research abroad.
While on location, she spends hours drawing, capturing the immediate impressions of a time and place. She sometimes enhances journal pages with ephemera from trips - tickets, wrappers, photos, flyers - producing collages of materials that speak of society.
Along with store-bought journals, Hendrickson creates handmade field journals as well as artists' books for her work. In May 2019, she was an Everglades National Park Artist In Residence in the Everglades.
“Drawing is central to my understanding of the world,” Hendrickson writes in her artist's statement. “Sitting down, picking up a pen or brush, and drawing allow me to dwell intensely with a subject. Drawing regularly as part of fieldwork also transformed my own research practice and now I both write and draw extensively when I travel.”
In this exhibit, there are examples of both her illustrated field journals and what she calls “anthro-artists' books.”
Tober is emeritus faculty in economics at Marlboro College. He studied economics at Berkeley (B.A., 1968) and at Yale (Ph.D., 1973) and came directly to Marlboro to begin his 40-year teaching career. He said his diverse teaching and administrative work over the years has influenced his collage making.
“In my senior year as a Berkeley undergraduate in the 1960s, having largely fulfilled my major requirements in economics, I enrolled in studio art courses - drawing, figure drawing, painting - on a very low-risk pass/not-pass basis,” Tober says in his artist's statement. “I found myself making a series of acrylic paintings on Masonite panels, featuring hard-edged geometric shapes and lines. It is now apparent that these share a sensibility with collage; some even incorporated mixed media.”
Tober said he set the painting aside for most of his career at Marlboro College, but returned to it as he was beginning retirement. He said his collage work to date “is eclectic and does not seem to me to be informed by a uniform aesthetic.”
An artist reception is planned for Jan. 25, from 1 to 3 p.m., at the gallery.