Imagine a wall hundreds of feet tall stretching from sea to shining sea. You sit and stare at the massive art pieces, twice your size. Artist Rick Shaefer urges you to take a better look.
“These up close are fun; you go up close and look at them, and there's all this squiggle and marks and little dots and lines, and it almost can look abstract in sections, and then you back off and it coalesces,” Shaefer said.
You first wonder: Are these walls meant to keep people in or out? And then you realize: Are those dinosaurs, helicopters, Walt Disney, an ode to “Star Wars” and … Emma Lazarus?
“Well, there's a bit of whimsy in all of these,” Shaefer said.
Running through mid-November, MoCA is showcasing three artists in an exhibit called “Looking for History.” Each artist asks the same question: What is America building and who exactly is it for?
Shaefer anchors the exhibition with his series called “Colossi.” His massive charcoal drawings not only incorporate history but bring a surrealist element to the exhibition.
Shaefer’s first piece in the series, “The New Colossus,” began as a vision in 2018 amid debate over putting up a southern border wall.
“I had this complete vision, which doesn't happen very often for this first piece. So, this is an odd one. There's angels, curtains, there's all kinds, there’s helicopters flying around,” Shaefer said.
In the foreground of the piece, a group of businessmen and bankers overlooks a huge wall inspired by the controversial Three Gorges Dam in China.
“In the middle of this group is Walt Disney, and there's a bunch of strange- it's a group of recognizable and non-recognizable people. So, the whole series kind of takes up that vein of throwing historical bits in that don't, are not chronological, don't mean anything, but they're meant to be disjunctive in a way and show that man's been doing this from prehistory,” Shaefer said.
Shaefer also included Emma Lazarus among this group of men. She is known for her poem “The New Colossus,” which is inscribed on a plaque at the Statue of Liberty and is famous for its message welcoming immigrants. The title of Shaefer's first piece is paradoxically taken from Lazarus’ poem.
“She’s in the back of this crowd of men, all in suits, bankers and dignitaries peering at us kind of accusingly. And this is the opposite of a parody on her welcoming gesture that she laid in her sonnet,” Shaefer said.
Shaefer draws inspiration from numerous movies and other artists who he says are fun to pick out and digest as you look at his art.
“They’re not a quick read. They're kind of one of those things where they’re like a novel or a big meal. They're kind of, you know, you kind of have to sit down and be with them for a while,” Shaefer said.
MoCA Executive Director Robin Jaffee Frank says that Shaefer’s work makes you think: Are Americans living up to our founding ideals?
“We went to Rick Shaefer's studio and we selected works along in consultation with the artist, the entire series of “Colossi,” as well as works from his refugee series, which of course are terribly important right now when increased migration has become an issue in the United States and all around the world,” Frank said.
Frank says that Shaefer breathes new life into historical works while also highlighting challenges unique to the 21st century.
“But frankly, to some degree, challenges that human beings have always faced about that conflict between walling in and walling out and asking, who are we building walls for? Who are we protecting? Who are we allowing in? These are timeless human questions,” Frank said.
Shaefer grew up in northern Europe and attended museums with his mother, where he quickly became enthralled with still lifes and landscapes. This fascination continued with British artists after moving to England.
“So I think I have a combination of English landscape and Dutch landscape and also Dutch still life all kind of homogenized into my pieces these days,” Shaefer said.
In his early career, Shaefer was a photography student at an art school in California. After graduation, he decided to move.
“So I opened a studio in New York City, did editorial fashion, black and white, I had painted on stuff. Art directors went crazy, what is it? But I was already painting and dealing with not straight photography but manipulated photography,” Shaefer said.
He moved his next studio to Connecticut. This is where Shaefer focused on conglomerate photography, painting and drawing, but found his work too claustrophobic. From there, Shaefer decided to pursue charcoal drawing, changing both his artistic direction and his studio, which he says helped clear his head.
When Shaefer switched from photography to charcoal as his main medium about 12 years ago, it was because of Rembrandt.
“I studied some etchings of Rembrandt with a magnifying glass and I thought, God, wouldn't it be fun to blow those marks, all these wonderful squiggles and stuff up really big? And charcoal just became the choice that seemed more fluid and easy and gestural for me,” Shaefer said. “These are just, it's all pretty much all line work, like an engraving blown up.”
Shaefer says that he loves what scale gives him when it comes to making fast, fluid lines. Creating larger-scale art pieces allows him to be less fine-tuned, he said.
Frank thinks Shaefer's work seduces people – and leaves them spellbound – so they can think critically about what they’re seeing.
“One of the things that you see when people come in is a lot of them stand there for a moment and go, oh wow, so surprised by the scale of Rick's work and its atmospheric quality. As they move closer, they often seem to be transfixed, carried along by his seductive use and the fluidity of his line and lost in it. And they get drawn in even by those mammoth walls that pull you into his landscapes,” Frank said.
Along with his “Colossi" series, Shaefer has several other pieces on display at MoCA. These include compositional studies, videos of his research process and pieces from different series.
