A crowd swelled inside the small TruSpace gallery at Desotorow Jan. 16 for the opening of “Seven Ply,” an exhibition of new works created on and out of skateboard decks.
Curated by Will Penny and featuring the work of 18 artists, both from SCAD and beyond, “Seven Ply” provided its exhibitors with up to three blank decks to do with as they pleased, and the results varied immensely.
The skateboards, sans wheels, hung uniformly on the wall, making the artists’ differing choices in direction the most fascinating aspect of the show. No specific theme or tone was suggested; the artists had total freedom to create what they wished from the seven molded layers of plywood that comprised each skateboard.
Some decks were illustriously painted, such as Tran Nguyen’s pendant pieces, “Feeding my Illusion” and “Our Weary Souls,” both for sale for $500. Nguyen’s work, previously shown on the SCAD Web site, is ethereal and delicate – it’s graphic enough to look at home on the underside of a skateboard deck, yet it made the obvious form of the skateboard almost disappear.
Other boards were taken in a different direction and created from tactile materials, such as Kay Wolfersperger’s “Pull Through.” Her deck was meticulously enveloped in a pink and burgundy yarn that transformed it from its original, functional use into something more sculptural and decorative.
At the far end of the TruSpace gallery, past decks that had been carved into, painted, quilted and sculpted upon, sat two large chairs. Created from scraped-up, chipped, used skateboards, the Adirondack-style seats were hung with signs inviting visitors to try them out.
This melding of art and functional reality is at the heart of skateboarding culture; skateboarding turns the concrete and metal of the city into a place of limitless possibility and lets those who partake in it see their environment in a completely different way. As stated in the show’s press release, “Seven Ply” serves to celebrate this license and present “the uninhibited freedoms that both art and skateboarding share.”
Photos by James Biscardi