It's not new for art to find beauty in the humdrum of the world, and it's certainly not new for artists to find beauty in the unusual, but Rachel Perry Welty takes the especially humdrum and composes beauty from it. Her deCordova Museum debut, "Rachel Perry Welty 24/7," sorts through the emotionally taxing stuff that overwhelms daily life and finds subtlety in the most underwhelming of materials.
Her focus is on things often relegated to the background. As a result, her work comes at you peripherally; each piece starts in a far-off emotional place, and you approach it detail by detail. All of her pieces are collections of small things: labels, missed-call notes, twist-ties. She takes these banal objects and their minimal emotional evocations and arranges them to reframe their discussion in the foreground.
Welty inserts herself into material usually devoid of personality. In "Deaccession Project" (2005-present), she has photographed something to get rid of every day for the past six years. Under each picture are a few words or sentences about how she acquired it or why she's getting rid of it, and how she's getting rid of it (donating, recycling, re-gifting, trashing). Lining the monstrous wall in chronological order, the photos of objects speak to her life, showing what she notices and how she thinks about what she owns. Her cathartic process is enthralling and inspiring, coming through in the stories she tells, her dry wit and self-conscious sentimentality.
Several pieces come from the severely mundane, including medical records, bills and Facebook status updates. In "Altered Receipt: Children's Hospital Bill for Inpatient Services" (2001-2), she selects a color for every word and number and blots them out like paragraph-shaped pointillism. The redundant jargon is reduced to bands and dots of bright colors, an Aboriginal interpretation of Morse code.
In "Transcription/Medical Record #32-52-52/001 (645 pages)" (2000) the droning is filled in, without pause, onto graphing paper. The ends of the sheets are left hanging in the air, the words unintelligible. There is no individual in this record, no patient. Not even the problem is discernable, just squares and squares of letter-symbol nonsense any direction you read.
"‘Rachel is' (Facebook status via iPhone)" (2009) addresses the junk we make and leave in our Internet lives. For one day, Welty updated her status every single minute, detailing her precise actions and thoughts; she has not updated it since. The scraps of news are displayed on a line of iPods, to watch the project unfold for eternity. Transcripts and bills are supposed to be tools, like social networking sites, to help keep life orderly, but they ultimately make a mockery of our trite habits.
Welty assembles spectacles out the most common materials. Six larger-than-life-size photos show Welty among objects made to be used once and trashed. She is reading a grocery store insert in front of a wall of collaged, unfolded cereal boxes. In a skyline of take-out boxes, she is holding, as if delivering, a Styrofoam offering. She is facing a wall of sticker price tags, organized by color and shape, holding a bag covered with the same tags wearing a gown covered with the same tags, plucking one from the masses. Her face is obstructed in all these pieces; she is becoming the environment she has created for herself.
One of the strongest elements of this show is the underscored humor. "Karaoke Wrong Number (2005-2009)" (2009) is a video montage of her acting out the recordings of answering machine messages from people with the wrong number. She stands in a white frame and takes on different lives and relationships with such clarity that it's a wonder they are strangers.
The triptych around the corner, "Soundtrack to my Life" (2009) feels like being held hostage at the grocery store, laundromat or gas station as bad hits with canned lyrics are played over synthesized drama on the loudspeakers. Welty has spelled the lyrics to three songs in letters cut from magazines she collected from waiting rooms, like ransom notes. There is nothing condescending about these pieces, as they are like learning to laugh at the world. What could be more normal?
In total, this show is like exhaling what you didn't know you were holding in. The work is simple, the messages realistic and the presentation elegant. Any one of these pieces alone is thought provoking, and together they sing of life as told by the stuff we mostly ignore.
