Trashy artwork on display at McDaniel
Carroll County Times
By Jordan Bartel, Times Staff Writer Saturday, September 01, 2007

The sound emanating from McDaniel College’s Rice Gallery last week was guttural and mysterious, something between a rumbling chain saw and a timid electric can opener.

Actually, it was a paper shredder, and Nadya Volicer was sitting on the floor feeding sheets of orange paper through the machine. She collected the strands of paper and placed them in a box. The papers weren’t bound for the trash. In fact, they’d soon be placed strategically on the floor of the gallery. The strands would soon become art.

“Sometimes this thing overheats,” Volicer said about the shredder.

Chances are it often overheats because Volicer’s work requires lots and lots of strands of paper. And also woven paper and crumbled and crinkled paper. Her materials are all recycled, save for some hot glue, thread and duct tape, and they include pages from magazines, newspapers and cardboard boxes.

Much of the material is collected wherever she’s working, hence the photocopied professor handouts comprising a section of her work at McDaniel, dubbed “This Land is Your Land[fill]: Artwork by Nadya Volicer,” on view starting Tuesday. It’s landscape art with a twist, giving the phrase “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” a new meaning altogether.

It’s sprawled out on the floor. Actually, it appears to have grown out of the hardwood. It’s bumpy and colorful and quiltlike, with flat, colorful panels and sharp mountains. There’s a winding river in the middle of the floor and pouring out of a window is a waterfall made of stripped newspaper sewn together. The professor’s one-time handouts form a gray, cave-like structure behind the waterfall.

“It’s a response to space,” Volicer said. “I like playing with how the viewer moves through space or even if they move at all. I often try to rerout people.”

Indeed, Volicer’s latest forces the viewer to walk around the art to get the cumulative effect. In the past, Volicer’s work has allowed viewers to walk through the art or even on top of it. It’s sculpture with an accessible bent.

A Bedford, Mass., native, Volicer starting doing this kind of project at the Massachusetts College of Art. Her first installation was completed in a hallway.

“It all started when I was working with clay and I just grew impatient waiting for things to dry,” Volicer said. “I passed by a home being renovated and they were just throwing out these gorgeous chunks of wood. I picked them up and used them.”

Volicer often works with wood on a large scale, her work exhibited across the East Coast and in England. A particularly striking piece was 2005’s “Home Spun,” a large tsunami-esque wave made of cardboard, construction mesh and recycled wood. Viewers actually walked through the wave.

Since starting to use recycled materials, Volicer has even recycled her recyclables. Part of this work comes from an earlier installation she did in Nebraska. Then those large sections of her sprawling work moved on to Connecticut. A few of the sections that comprise the McDaniel piece are third-generation Volicer art. But all three installations had entirely different themes. This latest work, she said, is something like a blue box explosion, referring to the containers that hold recyclable materials. When the exhibit goes off view, parts of it will be shipped back to Volicer.

While using recycled products came naturally, Volicer never fully intended to make her work a political statement. It’s really just morphed into that. “This Land is Your Land[fill],” is the most directly environmentally-conscious title she’s used for a piece, she said.

But Volicer truly just enjoys working with paper and wood. There’s no real sense of permanency with her work, and she’s fine with that. She likes working quickly on any particular piece — the projects can take anywhere from a few days to even a month — and wants her artistic voice to be heard loudly. Then, she kind of wants to get out of there, move to a new space and continue her work again.

“I never wanted to make something to sell it,” she said. “The business of art doesn’t interest me. But I do believe in the preciousness of the things I produce.”

And she likes how people feel connected to the art. They’ve perhaps worked with paper and wood before as well. There’s something relatable to not only the material, but the simplistic techniques Volicer uses to create her installations.

“There’s a certain level of removal when you use material like bronze,” she said. “It’s very much, Oh, I’m the artist, the genius and you’re the viewer. But with this kind of material, it looks and is more accessible.”

It’s also pretty ingenious. “This Land is Your Land[fill]” looks vaguely like a map of the United States, with flatlands, mountain ridges and bodies of water. The whole piece seems to have movement, with inch-long strands next to the waterfall suggesting the rumbling of a lake beneath it. In her travels, the Bedford, Mass., native has been inspired by the American landscape, especially the grand vastness of places like Wyoming.

“I mean, I look here and see the Mississippi River,” Volicer said, pointing to a carved-out, paper-free section near the middle of the piece. “I look over there and see the Rockies.”

And the tiny log cabin she’ll place in the middle of her work?

“The house is myself,” she said.

Reach staff writer Jordan Bartel at 410-857-7862 or jordan.bartel@carrollcountytimes.com.