Laurie LeClair’s exhibit is a mothball flashback—like opening a trunk in an abandoned house and exploring the everyday objects of a bygone world. LeClair says the exhibit is about memory and sorrow: “I wanted to bring people into the art with nostalgic images that everyone could relate to—then let them examine the more complex feelings in that same memory. When you turn nostalgia inside out, it’s always mixed with pain.”

Almanac, by Laurie LeClair

Collusion Unlimited, 652-5209

through November 1

“Almanac” re-creates LeClair’s memory of the abandoned Midwest she saw in 1995. It was a plague year; whole towns drowned in Mississippi floods or were scattered by hurricanes. Giant agri-corporations wreaked their own damage. The Nebraska landscape, as LeClair describes it, was like a strip-mined moon. “I saw a place that was active and, at the same time, completely abandoned. Vast, flat plains, stretching to the horizon, farmed by gigantic grain combines, but with no farmhouses in sight. Newspaper was blowing in the streets of abandoned towns. It was a Thomas Hart Benton scene, minus the people. An American dream gone sour.”

LeClair considers many “found objects” to be an overused artistic device—she calls them “thrift-shop assemblage.” Instead, she creates new objects, or carefully alters what she finds. Her Object Tard #1 and #2 (the name is a Duchamp-ian pun on “objet d’art”) are a crumpled scooter and a Christmas tree stand. She has gently laid them to rest in plush recesses, formed for their shapes, in boxes the size of children’s coffins. Furs and shawls caress the boxes’ hard edges. Each assemblage sits on roughhewn work benches, splattered with paint and scarred by tools.

Music Box is a green dresser drawer, adorned by palm trees and a tropical moon in fading yellow paint. Layers of children’s clothes, their colors fading, have settled in the drawer like fossils. Keepsakes have been left behind—a brown rabbit skin and a beaded belt, souvenir of “Rocky Mountain Park.” Buried beneath the clothes, a music box plays “My Bonnie.” Like piano scales practiced quietly next door, the piece has the sad feeling of a fall afternoon.

Throughout the exhibit, LeClair repeats images—windmill, cradle, rabbit, farmhouse—like the notes of a simple song. Echoing between objects, the visual melody becomes familiar. A central image is a Radio Flyer Wagon. Initially captured as a Christmas present in black-and-white photographs, it later becomes a real object in the exhibit. Rusting and no longer a toy, the red wagon is now used to carry kindling, green with moss.

Almanac—Goodnight is the Rosetta stone of the exhibit, or the farmhouse family Bible. LeClair’s facility with texture and materials is particularly evident here. Faded family photographs, hand-painted postcards, and pages from small calendars are cradled between fragile translucent sheets and heavy, stiff rosin paper. Each page has its own weight and weave.

The images gather potency as they repeat, like a flip-book moving at the measured pace of the seasons. Cars are crowned in winter snow, and a train retreats in the summer night, its red eyes burning. The cradle, large and wooden, is shown in spring rain, then in a fall sunset, licked by tongues of fire.

At the heart of Almanac—Goodnight is the farmhouse. You see it first as a strong black silhouette on the horizon, a monarch overseeing the green and gold riches of the field. By the last photograph, it is abandoned. Broken windows and a no-trespassing sign bid farewell to human habitation.

LeClaire’s images are secular reliquaries consecrating the memory of birth, life, and death on farms. To our grandparents or great-grandparents, farm life must have seemed as permanent as earth itself. Only a few generations separate us from them, but that life, for most, has disappeared. We can read “Almanac” as a book of those bygone days, of the families that were born in the cradle, played with the Radio Flyer, and lived in the farmhouse. By honoring their material objects, LeClair brings the immaterial back to life.