The Crystal Chandeliers Light Up the Paintings On Your Walls

With Flushing Fascism Fleet now on view at Nemeth Art Center as part of the group show curated by Aaron Spangler, The Crystal Chandeliers Light Up the Paintings on Your Walls, artist Pete Driessen orchestrates a mixed media sculptural installation that foregrounds ideas of resistance, solidarity, and mutual aid. The title Flushing Fascism Fleet is based upon the typical sportsman’s dance of flushing out pheasants with their hunting dogs, along with the word, fleet, utilized for group purchasing at a discount. Yet in this exhibit, a platform containing a bouquet of diverse pheasant figurines depicts a role reversal scenario where the hunted become the hunter. In this case, the bouquet of pheasants calls to collective action to root out Fascism within our local and global society.

Arranged on the platform or ‘pheasant carrier’ rests a V-shaped selection of found objects creating a graphic vignette probing current dystopian matters, resistance and violence. Conceptually and collectively under the veneer of normalcy, the pheasants demonstrate a fragmented narrative of provocative tension underlying an unstable, mundane surface. With their wing movement, feather capacity and quick flight ability, the bouquet emblematizes our shared nervous dysregulation, emotional venting and physical torment. The presentation of these everyday objects appears ominous yet are delicately assembled as fragile works expressing risk, danger and vulnerability. As the pheasant bouquet forms, with their intertwined physical, behavioral, and symbolic characteristics, a relational power network emerges that cultivates their creative output and its collective goal of mutual coexistence.

Pheasants are a non-native avian species to North America introduced from the central Eurasian continent, and related to jungle fowl, peacocks, ptarmigans, turkeys, partridges and quail. The birds were shipped in metal or wooden cages to the North American coasts and traveled inland by horse drawn cart and later train to the Midwest. In a recent exhibit, the artist researched the distinctive vectors of the pheasant feathers and their interrelationship with motion, natural propagation and captive breeding, and interspecies habitat loss. The artist utilizes these human influenced conditions on the bird to spark dialogue about our current treatment of humans within our society. The jarring flushing action symbolically raises concerns of assimilation, immigration, labor rights, and familial and cultural impact.

The Fleet advances upon an angled wooden pedestal painted white and tooled with plywood and pine sawhorses and engages a broad community of materials: glass, textile, ceramic, wood, paper, metal, and ephemera. These Fleet elements are sourced online, in person, or chance moments from diverse local, regional, and national venues, with the artist often meeting the original owner during “pheasant pickup.” The bouquet contains a large collection of thrift and vintage finds, from an MCM oval pheasant ashtray and ceramic tea pot to a hokey mini thermometer and vintage sparkling card decks, to ever popular Rosemeadeceramic figurines and Avon Pheasant Rough Leather Cologne & Aftershave decanters. On a nearby wall a sole taxidermy Ring Neck Pheasant with painted nails swoops in for landing to join the nide and form an ever-growing directional march towards freedom and solidarity. Installed in an intimate back gallery space of the Nemeth, these anonymous and generic objects from everyday life collectively assemble to form a collaborative march of resistance.