American Icon
American Myth
Alley Culture

In such a young country, with little history or mythology to call our own, American stories were crafted out of tall tales of heroic deeds infused with European and Native American folklore. The tallest of such tales of iconic American ruggedness and legendary feats to rival even Hercules, is of course the giant lumberjack Paul Bunyan. As the story goes, after a most unusual birth, our hero soon got too big for his birthplace of Maine and he and his giant blue ox Babe headed off to Minnesota. The many lakes of that state are credited to coming from their tracks, as some stories say the Great Lakes themselves were scooped out by the giant man as a watering trough for his great ox. As he continued to clear forests in the Midwest, Bunyan worked his way west across the country where he eventually ended his days.

It’s the lumberjack’s own pioneering spirit and industriousness, like the story of John Henry that eventually leads to the loss of the very way of life that he loved. With the great forests cleared, the great man worked his way out existence. Yet this legend of Americana holds strong in various outposts throughout the Midwest and the West, in the form of roadside giant sized sculptures of the man and often times his bovine companion. The five artists that comprise Paul Bunyan Fine Art investigate this legendary figure as folktale and telling critique of our current state.

Detroiter turned Northwesterner, curator James Milostan is responsible for bringing together this exhibition. In his own work there’s a clear love for this icon and the spirit he represents, as well as an acknowledgment of all that we’ve lost. Bunyan is a cheerfully, tragic character in much of this work. Milostan creates assemblages containing Bunyan memorabilia coupled with Michigan imagery, woodprints, and stenciled, spray painted Bunyan symbols. The Upper Peninsula figures prominently, as do airstream trailers – a mix of a love for the outdoors now debased through experiencing nature from within the protection of an aluminum shell.

Detroiter Matthew Hanna offers up many portraits of the giant lumberjack and his ox in a variety of different styles. These are at times self-portraits, as it becomes clear that Bunyan’s tale is one the artist can identify with, as perhaps his story can be linked to ours as a people. The paintings range from the almost childlike and expressive, to more sophisticated (in rendering) images of the man collaged with his dwindling forest. Hanna’s Bunyan is not larger than life, though he is, but is part of life, is as full of different emotions as everyone.

Bob Jordan depicts Bunyan in more decorative fashion as quite human and as icon gracing towering over the roadside. An image of the lumberjack standing over a now cleared forest, with the equally large Jolly Green Giant, speaks both to the clearing of America to make way for agriculture, which in turn make way for industrialization and corporate agriculture – of which the Green Giant stands for. (Some years ago I had the good fortune to pass through Blue Earth, Minnesota, and stand in the shadows of the “world's largest statue of the Jolly Green Giant, overlooking some of America's richest farmland.” (As it says on the town’s website.))As travelers there is great fascination in these icons, just as they serve as sources of pride for the folks whose communities they are a part of.

Jeff Gerber’s series of painted pop, beer, and other bottles is quite a treat. Gerber offers some exquisite painting, all while displaying a tremendous range of styles. One can imagine that a bottle would be a difficult surface to paint on to begin with and Gerber not only handles this with ease, but in addition to more straightforward paintings adorning the outside of the bottle, in a few cases on clear bottles he paints just one side of the bottle, creating an image only visible in looking through the front of the glass. This means he has to create the painting in reverse, as what’s put down first becomes the most exterior level of the painting. In his different works he explores the mythological side and the modern world wrought by the destruction of the forest. Urban sprawl, clear cut forests, and even McDonald’s make their way into individual bottles. On a triptych of bottles titled “Paul Bunyan’s Vision of the Future Destruction of Resources and Society,” the logger is juxtaposed onto Easter Island – a society that long ago apparently exhausted all its resources and subsequently died out. These would be cautionary tales, but it’s possible we’re already past that point of no return. In a gold painted Faygo bottle, the logger is seen as proud, inheritor of some modernistic future, yet all alone. In another, Bunyan’s forest gives way to a teeming subdivision.

Capping off the exhibition, is the lone female artist, Hiroko Sakurai offers images of solitary trees, each one on a single painted panel displaying perhaps the last in a grove. These are haunting, isolated shafts on ghostly white backgrounds. The legacy of the woodsmen in his haste to expand, to be more efficient, that can-do attitude, has robbed him of that land and that prized beauty in wilderness that he loved.

Paul Bunyan may be a faded legend, but his story still carries weight and significance beyond the road side attractions. In closing, we pose some questions:

What better place to host such an exhibition than a state in which it was claimed to be so full of trees such that squirrel could travel from shore to shore without ever touching the ground? (It’s also noteworthy that the first articles in print collecting the oral tales of Bunyan appeared in Michigan papers in the early 1900s.) Now that state no longer has so many trees nor news outlets for that matter.

What better place than Detroit to symbolize all that Paul Bunyan built, and now a new kind of frontier town, in the post-industrial, urban decay sort of way.

And finally, what better place to display the work than Alley Culture, an outpost on this new frontier, on the border of the urban and the wilderness – definitely in keeping with the pioneering spirit of legend. This is a truly different sort of exhibition, and shows why Alley Culture is such a vital place in these times. – Nick Sousanis
ws@thedetroiter.com