Joel Swanson has spent his entire artistic career questioning the order of things.
Who, for example, decided just how long an inch should be or how many of them should count as a foot? Or which letters should come first, second or third in the alphabet? Who got to draw the borders of states and countries?
And, taking that further, how do those decisions, sometimes logical, others arbitrary, impact how individuals process information and understand their world?
He is not the first artist to wonder about this topic. “There is nothing more tentative, nothing more empirical (superficially, at least) than the process of establishing an order among things,” French philosopher Michel Foucault wrote in 1966, making the query the center of an entire book.
Swanson brings up that quote himself, an acknowledgment of Foucaultap influence on his own artistic output — though Swanson takes a much more direct, and considerably less wordy, approach to his work.
As his current exhibition — “Orderings,” at the Foothills Arts Center — shows, Swanson is able to reduce the investigation to a single object or character.
The exhibitap centerpiece is a hanging sculpture, titled “Logic Only Works in Two Dimensions.” The object is made from aluminum and shaped into a mathematical “greater than” symbol –a sideways “V” — that is 6 feet tall and 6 feet wide.
Or, wait … maybe it is a “less than” symbol, because the piece spins from a wire cable and the view that visitors get shifts along with it. The effect is to make us wonder what things might be greater than other things and just how sure we can be about our facts. It is a consequential notion in a contemporary society where someone, or something, can be great one day and gone the next.
The piece, which was made in 2014 and has become a signature for Swanson, is a nice attention-getter for an exhibit that is otherwise loaded with new and provocative pieces the artist made in the last few years. It’s clear that his mind continues to wander.
Often, it goes back to his childhood when he first began learning how to order. He frequently employs material associated with kids to make his points, like crayons and marshmallows.
One piece in the current show uses small pieces of pasta in the shape of letters of the alphabet, the kind children like to eat and play with during mealtimes. The work is called “Stochastic Journal Entry: January 4, 1992” and, like many of Swanson’s highly conceptual things, requires some context from its maker to fully understand.
As Swanson explained in an interview, he kept journals while growing up. One recent day, he was going through them.
“I was struck with this one particular day,” he said. “It starts out about how I really like typing class, and then I just kind of complained about these two boys in my class.”
Swanson got a box of pasta and went through it meticulously, looking for letters to spell out the actual words he had journaled. “I sat there for a couple of hours with tweezers and picked out, you know, ‘G,’ ‘H,’ ‘E’ and so forth and so on.”
For the artwork, he scattered the letters randomly on a table and covered them in a soup of Elmer’s glue. The piece sits on a pedestal at Foothills Art Center, and since the letters are scrambled, it is impossible to read.
For Swanson, itap a way of illustrating how language functions — letters have to be in order for them to work, otherwise chaos ensues — but also to talk about the confidentiality of daily diaries. Here, he is revealing his personal thoughts on a given day but still obscuring them to protect his privacy.
Other works require less explanation — though, it is fair to say, not much less.
Swanson often uses blinking road signs in his work, the type that are set along highways and programmed to flash, so that motorists know which direction to take. Drivers often see them in the form of arrows advising them to head left or right.
The piece in this show shakes that up. Swanson has programmed the lights so that arrows start from each side and move in a way where they meet in the middle. If the sign were placed at an actual intersection, it would be confusing, even dangerous. The work shows, in a sense, how we give over complete authority to these signs, even though they can be confounding at times.
Other everyday objects Swanson plays with in “Orderings” include rulers, pages from found dictionaries, flags of different nations and, in a particularly fun work, video snippets from the vintage television show “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.”
One piece, made from reflective steel, employs a map of the United States. Swanson has cut out the shape of each state, about 4 inches wide each, and simply thrown them all into a pile in the middle of the floor. Suddenly, the order of an entire country is in flux.
And so, by extension, is our comprehension of the different laws and customs of each place: We are a nation of contradictions, differences, disorder. Swanson’s work, in general, is not overly political, but at a time when states are making rules on their own terms — say, in the case of abortion — the work comes off as pointed commentary.
But the exhibition’s greatest strength is its simplicity — not of thought but of materials. That Swanson can question so much, and so profoundly, with so little is a wonder, and he seems to have limitless ideas. The work is, for the most part, a joy to be around. Itap fun, sometimes even hilarious, always a puzzle.
At mid-carrier, Swanson has the aura of a young artist just starting out. Following his creative journey is a blast.
IF YOU GO
“Orderings” continues through Nov. 3 at the Foothills Art Center, 822 12th St., Golden. Info: 303-279-3922 or foothillsartcenter.org.
