“I Did This to Myself.” created by artist Patrick Collier was a body of work displayed at CEI projects in Corvallis Oregon during the month of April in 2019. Repurposed objects whose use value as utilitarian objects have been circumvented and brought into the aesthetic realm as three assemblage sculptures and a tryptic of graphite on wood. Objects, many of which function to protect the body, such as pool noodles, safety vests, gauze, among many other found objects act as vital agents of the material worlds heroic last ditch effort, a hail mary pass, to protect the body from the sabotage of living.

In the piece ‘Balance is an An Abstraction.” tiny green and blue pool noodles are wrapped in pink plastic next to a painted black rectangle (maybe a sponge) these are all bound together with bungee chord keeping the collection of objects from flying apart, resting on a thick plank that is subtly painted in a pink to green gradation and lying on the ground. The last place something balancing wishes to be. Pink and light blue paint splatters the surface in a nod to gestural abstract painting. The tiny green pool noodles sprout from the bungeed object giving the piece a green onion like feel adding a reaching feeling of searching for light. Or an assemblage that is grasping into thin air, reaching to stand tall again after having fallen and not being able to get up.

“I Did This to Myself.” resembles a gastrointestinal tract guttural form stuffed with a wadded up with safety vest, trash bags, sponges, and swimming pool noddles (one pink one Blue)acting as viscera all upon a clay base sits on a pedestal. Safety vests scream a desire for visibility and protect one from collision avoiding an impact from those going about their own lives oblivious to your existence. The GI tract extracts and absorbs nutrients. Trash bag are a receptacle of extraction while a yellow doobie sponge sits like an organ. A sponge scrubs. Removes. Cleans yet is filthy and Is filled with bacteria remnants remain of last attempts scrub clean. Pool noodles do a serpentine intestinal weave through all these objects, moving the eye.

At the foot of the pedestal lay an object resembling a leg in a splint. Bent arterial pool noodles with tiny pool noodles as veins affixed to boards and a bakers peel with camouflage patterned gauze holding it all together. A splint is used to protect and immobilized movable parts that have been damaged or undergone trauma. Making a splint with the rigid structure being a bakers peel (a flat wide paddle shaped board for removing breads from an oven) Christian faith has ground into our psyche a link between bread and the body and this “brainpan” association serves to flesh out the limb-ness of this assemblage.

On the wall is “Story Problems of a Personal Nature.” A graphite on wood triptych with graphite blobs plopped down on the surface with numbers on them. Drawing of the excretory phase of artistic production as the title In relation to the other work in the show point the numbers to the body.
The numbers at first blush brought me to finances but then a more likely indicator of levels or doses. Pharmaceutical doses, cholesterol levels, blood sugar…etc…

Finally the in “The Weight of Words.” straws rescued from their single use pariah status as devils of the anthropocene are implemented in an emergency tracheotomy to deliver air to the voice wrapped in a measuring tape. Bag clips pinch and seal to project food from stale the influence of air. Or act as a tourniquet to inhibit from of speech. Thankfully I don’t know what to think of the stuffed purple hippopotamus at the base of this sculpture surrounded by four short table legs. Perhaps a nod to assemblages roots as an absurdist anti-art gesture over a hundred years ago? Throwing a well deserved monkey wrench in my fairly literal interpretation? But I digress… On the wall a cutting board (protector of countertops and preventer of cross contamination and a hyper focus of food safety regulators) functions as a speech balloon depicting a fog of a thought forming into speech. Dangerous contaminating speech wash our mouth out with soap these days before you say another word in a world where so much goes on unsaid, despite all the screaming.

In “I did this to myself” the artist is in kahoots with the vibrant agency of the external forces of matter. Animate objects work their nonsense magic weaseling their way into the gallery as the artist found, sought, out, and rearranged these objects in the throws of a fever dream confusion effected by the reflexive desire to save oneself from a realm beyond the body which acts upon us all. Once broken we are fixed by surgeons dancing around with things. Once fixed what are we left with? What have we become.