Vector Sector: A Dispositif in Field, Studio & Gallery

In Vector/Sector: A Dispoitif in Studio, Field, & Gallery, visual artist Pete Driessen situates his sculptural works in three distinct spatial vectors each with a different set of conditions: artist’s studio/ideation space, NE Sculpture field/creation site, and NE Sculpture Gallery/presentation arena. Driessen investigates these site vectors with several material sectors centering on car parts, barn cupolas, logging saws, pheasant figurines, and gentleman’s valet chairs. The presentation of these large tools, industrial components, and agricultural detritus appear ominous yet assembled as fragile and delicate works expressing human risk, danger and vulnerability.

The title Vector/Sector and the work Driessen presents moves beyond the standard homogenous mathematical forms for visualizing a typical aerodynamic vector or computerized digital pie chart sector. Driessen emphasizes socio political and economic variants on the academic meaning of vector modeling, via the science of waves and frequency, rugged tinkering production methods, and the postcolonial behaviors of idiosyncratic collecting, individualized disconnection, and separatist categorization. Questions arise: Who gets to define what interdisciplinary vectors and transitory sectors look like? Where do nontraditional vectors or hybridic sectors begin or end? What are the hidden modes of socio political and socio-economic power located within invisible vectors or covert sectors?

Dispositif Defined:  Driessen begins with Michel Foucault’s broad notion of the dispositif as an overarching working apparatus to define various creative working sites and their intertwined physical, behavioral, and psychological infrastructures and spatiality. Together, the three dispositif sites-- field, studio, and gallery, form relational links and networks of power which influence the creative output, and which coexist in constant states of becoming and unbecoming, exchange and modification, and orchestration and transposition. The tripartite exhibit effects within the three sites gather what Von Bismark calls, “entanglements of the curatorial.” (Von Bismark, The Curatorial Condition, pg. 30.)

Within the working field outside the gallery, Driessen has fashioned a large wooden found car parts sculpture, Joe’s Auto Parts, along the wall of the NE Gallery Factory building. The public sculpture stands as requiem to a living rural Minnesota junk yard dealer that specialized in Ford auto parts, one of Minnesota’s first U-pull yards, in business for over 60 years, and still working after 80 years of age. The slotted frame & cubby form reflect a smaller portion of a larger traditional corn crib rack that the tinkering entrepreneur modified for car doors, hoods, & fenders. The fifteen cubbies housing 27 car doors and 3 fenders ranging from the years 1953 to 1975, all still retain original elements with their idiosyncratic identifying language scribbled by the auto salvager still visible. Included amongst the sedans, wagons, hardtops, and two and four door parts are the common Ford Fairlane, Fairmont, Falcon, Galaxie 500, LTD, Mustang, Torino, Grand Torino, Mercury Marquis, and more.

In the NE Sculpture Gallery, Driessen has conceived a selection of graphic narrative vignettes probing current dystopian matters, authoritarianism, resistance and violence. A platform containing a bouquet of diverse pheasant figurine ephemera, Flushing Fascism Fleet, 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. A series of vintage gentleman’s butler valet chairs, Marching Stewards, illuminates the romantic resistance deploying a ragtag bunch to counter authoritarian forces. In Saw Feeding Trough, an alignment of 24 vintage carpenter saws awaits their duty call while resting on a vintage metal chicken feeder and small rotational copula. And in Sit In, features a large logging saw-roofed shed, teetering on four cupolas, protecting an isolated gentleman’s butler chair. Conceptually and collectively under the veneer of normalcy, the works form an obscure fragmented narrative of mysterious tension and darkness underlying an unstable, mundane surface. With jarring physical juxtapositions, the artist seeks potential safety, security, and resolve within our unsettled and vulnerable political ecosystem.