Audio By Carbonatix
Kevin Bouchard crawls on his belly like a reptile, struggling to get his flashlight hand up in front and squinting in the darkness. With decades-old dampness seeping into his shirt, he coughs from musty air and cobwebs and looks for some sign of damage–dry rot, termites, water marks–from this unique vantage point. “Vintage homes, pier-and-beam foundations, a blessing and a curse,” he says, wedged between beams in a 36-inch high space between the ground and the floor joists of the place he calls home. “Crawl space,” he says.
Some years back, when his son, Andy, began to pull up on the furniture to stand, teeter and eventually learn to walk, Bouchard remembers getting on all fours himself and cruising this same house in parental panic. “I looked for sharp corners, unsteady bookcases, protruding bric-a-brac,” he says. “I crawled around our whole house with foam padding and duct tape.” Crawl space.
Elements of Bouchard’s life, like most artists’, inspired Crawl Space, his new solo show of sculpture and installation art opening March 6 at Fort Worth’s artist-run alternative space Gallery 414. “Think about crawl space literally and metaphorically,” he says. “It’s all about access–to the guts of your house, to your gut in an emotional sense.” At 46, Bouchard is an accomplished sculptor, home designer/renovator, custom furniture builder and woodworker. He writes poetry and prose. He has crafted all the pieces for Crawl Space in a short eight weeks, but the concept has nagged at him for a while. “In our darkest moments, we sometimes find ourselves crawling,” he says.
Walking (or crawling) from room to room in Gallery 414, in a vintage house at 414 Templeton near Fort Worth’s cultural district, viewers will experience Bouchard’s art on two levels. “Bowed Slate” appears to be an early-20th-century schoolhouse blackboard, 7 feet long and 4 feet tall. “When you reach up and touch it, you’d swear that’s what it was,” Bouchard says. Yet the center bows out, as if something is pushing it from behind. “You can’t literally bow slate, because it’s such a brittle material,” he says. The blackboard is crafted from composite materials, painted with chalkboard paint and wet-sanded.
In the gallery’s large back room, Bouchard mounts a flood gauge, essentially a giant vertical yardstick, an obelisk-shaped highboy chest, a photograph of an infant being weighed on scales and the impressive “Portalis,” whose title Bouchard thinks will be transparent. Crafted of Honduran mahogany with a traditional furniture finish, “Portalis” is a swivel-dressing mirror almost 8 feet tall. When viewers try to look in the mirror, only a ghostly, distorted reflection will appear. “It’s a play on words with ‘portal’ and Alice in Wonderland, or Through the Looking Glass,” Bouchard says. He achieved the effect by applying silver leaf on the back of a pane of glass. “Your reflection is only a fragment of who you are,” he says.
Bouchard ties certain pieces together thematically with an isolated text piece consisting of an oversized book page lettered with one of his poems. “What I’m hoping,” he says, “is that the emotional tone of the poem has resonance with the objects in the back room.” This approach unifies the exhibition into an art installation, not so much site-specific as contextual. The objects that appear real at first cry out for a second look. “People usually go, ‘Wait a second!'” Bouchard says. “I like the tactile, visceral, in-the-world feeling of this art,” he says, “and the fact that there is always more to it.”
