Arriane Dar: Regeneration

Bolinas Sculptor Arianne Dar used small paper bags and staples to turn the Bolinas Museum’s Coastal Marin Artists gallery into a fantastic sculptured installation.

Dar takes objects out of their everyday contexts and reworks them, sometimes: in incongruous materials, by fragmentation, by shifts of scale, or in recombination with other elements. In doing so she seeks to activate her viewer and explore modes of knowing, question basic assumptions, and expose the limits of truth.

This installation has a strong biological reference and appear to be some kind of simple many-celled organism, something one might explore close up under a microscope, blown up a thousand fold. That in itself is fascinating, but the floor pile of 20 pounds of buttons is a clue to something more, tying the art to local history. The piece is a tribute to Samuel P. Taylor who was the first to produce paper bags west of the Mississippi River. In 1856 Samuel P. Taylor built the first paper mill on the West Coast. Bolinas Lagoon served as the port for the entire area, so all the materials for the paper mill and its products passed through Bolinas where schooners loaded and unloaded for their commute to and from San Francisco. The paper was made of rags from cotton clothes.  It was the time of the Gold Rush when people from all over the world were pouring into San Francisco, so the cast-off garments came from everywhere.  Once they arrived for processing, all the buttons had to be cut off and huge piles of them accumulated at the mill.

“It is integration of our local industrial past with fragility of our current environmental present. It is intended to be reminiscent of a fragment of a sea organism, and suggestion of strength and resiliency. However rather than being something we’d find on the beach and hold in our hand we are asked to enter into it at a more visceral level.”

Arianne Z Dar has been living and working in West Marin for the past seven years.  She moved here from inner west Philadelphia after completing an MFA in sculpture from the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Art. She has a strong background in Film, Theater and Education but has always seen the world through a sculptor’s eyes.