Onward! Janet Van Fleet Keeps It Rolling With ‘MOVEMENT’

Witness a parade. Or maybe it’s a caravan or a political protest. A ragtag army. A celebration. An exodus. A mob.

Many possible narratives play out in “MOVEMENT,” Janet Van Fleet‘s solo exhibition on view at the T.W. Wood Gallery in Montpelier through January 28. The show is one single installation made up of many parts. Most of the gallery is given over to a wide path of painter’s drop cloths, undulating from a high point in one corner and spreading out across the floor. A crowd of figures, creatures and conveyances perambulates across it, all headed in the same direction.

Around the room, Van Fleet has installed a series of more than two dozen sculptural faces — most ranging from 10 to 15 inches high — on wall-mounted shelves. They survey the scene like an audience, or perhaps a jury. On a tour of the installation, Van Fleet said she initially conceived of the faces as individuals stacked in a kind of yearbook photo spread.

The Cabot artist has been making sculptures from found objects for decades. A founding member of Studio Place Arts in Barre, where she has maintained a studio going on 25 years, she has exhibited widely in Vermont and abroad.

Many of the sculptures in “MOVEMENT” made their debuts in past installations, and their component parts each have their own histories. Some came to Van Fleet through her many connections in the Vermont art world. Defunct coiled heating elements from Pamela Wilson and Georgia Landau’s Studio Place Arts kiln now comprise a bird’s nest; a finial from assemblage artist John Parker’s studio in Chelsea has become a rabbit’s nose. One face is made from a bent lighting fixture canopy from the Conant Metal & Light trash pile. A wooden sculpture features an old machine for practicing Morse code, found during renovations at East Montpelier’s Fox Market and now displayed on the standing figure’s chest, its cord plugged in where a mouth should be.

Van Fleet takes her cues from her materials, letting them be themselves while coming together into something else entirely. She found a wooden object, maybe part of an old water pump, in her basement and repurposed it as part of a standing figure; the way it flares and the curve of its edges make a very convincing torso. Atop it, a rusty metal bicycle seat gestures like a praying mantis’ head. Two ribbed wooden dowels, taken from old woodworking clamps, form long arms, which hold a shallow bowl of squiggly, shiny wires — a nest for a wooden bird. The figure even has a little driftwood penis: “You may have noticed,” Van Fleet said jokingly, “that there are lots of penises in my work.”

One of the strengths of “MOVEMENT” is that each component is similarly storied, bringing another layer of narrative to the installation without spelling out any single perspective. A viewer may not know exactly what each character is doing, but action is clearly taking place. Van Fleet has embraced the artistic challenge she has set for herself: imbuing cast-off, sedentary and stolid materials with personality and a sense of motion.

Each of the figures in the procession has a feathered friend somewhere, many of them added to earlier sculptures. A person made from a wooden ironing board, previously called “Fishing,” has caught a bird where once it held a fish in its button-studded net. A tall figure hides a tiny bird behind a city of blocks in its boxy torso. Nearby, a bird soars over a small-scale scene where animated folks made of wood and bent nails, only a few inches tall, dance, cook and drink tea from a miniature samovar.

Van Fleet doesn’t want to be prescriptive about the birds’ meaning, explaining only that “I just knew that there always needed to be a bird.”

What unifies Van Fleet’s work in the face of all this disparate activity is her adherence to a distinct aesthetic. She’s discriminating in her materials, making use of wood, rusted or dull metal, bone, wire, leather, and rubber but never plastic. Bottle caps and buttons sometimes offer surprising pops of color, but the overall tone of the work is earthy and rich. That extends even to the stained drop cloths in the installation, which Van Fleet borrowed from a house painter friend.

It’s hard not to ascribe meaning to “MOVEMENT,” especially during such a fraught time. Politically active herself, Van Fleet has never shied away from making a statement with her artwork. On one level, the procession recalls countless news images of families trudging through Gaza, their possessions strapped to cars pulled by donkeys, or of caravans of migrants trekking through Mexico. Many of the figures also exude a hopeful energy. Van Fleet intended the exhibition to be installed as the country was headed to a brighter future, she said, but that path has taken a sharp turn since the election.

Van Fleet doesn’t specify for the viewer a destination for her characters and creatures or a role for the faces she has included in the installation, be they participants or observers. But that lack of clarity gives the work dimension, referencing the political without being didactic. “You never bloody well know where you’re going,” she said, talking about the wider state of the world, “and you never know where it‘s going, but nevertheless, it’s kind of a relentless movement in one direction.”

This article appears in Dec 11-17, 2024.

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