IF YOUR KIT HAS A MIRROR WITH A HOLE IN IT, USE IT
Don Fels
OCTOBER 12-NOV 30, 2008

If Your Kit Contains a Mirror with a Hole in It, Use It is the intriguing title of a new solo exhibition opening at the Port Angeles Fine Arts Center on Sunday, October 12. The artist in question is Don Fels and the admonition of the title is taken from the field manual carried by his father in World War II. The large paintings that comprise the show stem from his father’s experiences as a cargo pilot flying “The Hump,” as the heroic airlift that supplied China from India came to be known.

Over his three-decade career as an artist Don Fels has been known for projects that have a firm conceptual foundation, pursue socially engaged themes, and are driven by an irresistible predilection for collaborative methods that bring artists from near and distant cultures into his creative process. Based since 1974 in Fall City, Washington, he has again and again ventured abroad for extended periods to immerse himself and his family in unfamiliar landscapes and cultures.

A lifelong affinity with teaching — mentoring preschoolers to graduate students and for the last decade and a half as adjunct faculty at the University of Washington — is surely significant in the ever-present didactic elements that flow through the imagery and content of his work.

Fels has always been attracted to the marketplace and to the public square and has worked in Europe, Indonesia, India and Malaysia as well as in the U.S. on projects with particular emphasis on the history of trade. Having majored in History and English as well as Art, Fels’s base creative sensibility is that of the collagist— a storyteller who collects images from existing visual genres to recombine and cast new meanings on cultural fragments from the past.

A concurrent exhibition at the Tacoma Art Museum (What is a Trade: Donald Fels and Signboard Painters of South India, Sept. 13 – January 18) draws on the legacy of Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese adventurer who developed the direct spice trade between Europe and India and served as a “fulcrum of globalism.” Building his designs with sharply drawn graphics and block text that owe allegiance to billboards and signboards, he mines the canons and language of a visual medium that has long dominated the avenues of commerce on the Indian sub-continent.

During a succession of residencies in South India over the past decade Fels has employed signboard painters to create his finished paintings from his designs. In his own version of outsourcing labor Fels employs members of a vanishing class of artisans who are being rapidly replaced by digital technology. Their ubiquitous hard-edged illustrations, hawking everything from the latest offerings of the Bollywood film industry to street merchants’ wares, struck him as a perfect medium with which to make art about the history of trade.

Fels set up shop with his crew in a dilapidated three hundred year old pepper warehouse (godown) in Cochin. He presented the painters with color-pencil sketches and printouts of photographic collages, cobbled together in Photoshop, as cartoons for their brushwork to be executed with high gloss enamel paints on modular 4’ x 4’ lightweight aluminum panels that would be durable and economical to ship back to the U.S.

As his trade series developed Fels’s experiences in India awakened elements of a dormant family history that was also rooted under this tropical sun. Approaching the age at which his father had died (63), the patterns of research and analysis that had guided his artistic methods took a more personal and introspective path.

Flying “the Hump” had been one of the most dangerous assignments of the war. Weighted down with crammed cargo and depending on notoriously unreliable navigational instruments to guide them through a sea of three-mile high peaks often shrouded in mists and ice, these daredevil pilots experienced a fatality rate of nearly fifty percent. Alan Fels survived physically intact and fathered Don a year after his return, but suffered post-traumatic effects mired in the alcohol that pilots depended on to calm their nerves and don their courage.

The fact that Don’s own son Benjamin was turning 23 -— the same age of independence that the young man’s grandfather had been when he began flying with death as his co-pilot — brought more specters of mortality into the artist’s perusings under Indian skies. It now seemed prescient that the aluminum panel format, which he had established for his previous narratives, shared a striking material affinity with the skins of the aircraft in which his dad’s chilling adventures had transpired.

Pinned flush to the wall and cheek-to-jowl as they are in the current installation, they clad the whole exhibition space in a hull of sheet metal that gives viewers the sense that they themselves are in the fuselage of a cargo plane. That impression is given wings by the foothill perch of the Webster House.

The key painting of the series depicts a leather-helmeted pilot sighting a rescue plane along the dotted line that directs his vision through a signal mirror held in his extended hand. The voice-over caption printed in block letters reads directly from a survival booklet in the elder Fels’s pilot gear, “If your kit has a mirror with a hole in it, use it.”

That might well serve as a mission statement for Don Fels. The artist’s plight is always to look through the keyhole of experience at a receiver of his message located on the horizon. That the narrow aperture is engulfed in a mirror reflecting the pilot-survivor’s own face presents a private zone of self-scrutiny, where the artist’s language takes shape and underlies the message he sends glinting to those in position to receive it.