Most artists' work tries to comfort people, says Oregon artist Mike Randles. But Randles doesn't want to make comfortable art. His paintings and sculptures explore contradictions, and that upsets some people. And while he doesn't intend to disturb, Randles can't ignore the ambiguities of life in his work. "If it's not happy art, I'm sorry," he says.
Randles's pieces have caused a furor more than once. In 1989, Artquake, a Portland exhibition, accepted his work and then refused to show it. He was expelled from the University of Oregon's Masters of Fine Arts program for, he claims, "political incorrectitude." He admits that the work he had been doing at the time was "testy," but he says another factor in the expulsion was that he was creating too much art - 12 exhibitions in five months. Laura Alpert, head of the fine arts department, would not comment on Randles's expulsion.
Six years later, Randles is still actively creating and showing art. For the third time, one of his sculptures has been selected to travel in the Shoebox Sculpture Exhibition, a prestigious two-year international exhibition of small sculptures organized by the University of Hawaii. He also has a show on display at Chemeketa Community College in Salem, Oregon.
Randles is a former National Endowment for the Arts Artist in Residence in Eugene. He’s been creating art for 34 years, and he's held a variety of jobs: army officer, sailor, ski instructor, farm owner, cattle rancher, sailing teacher. "You live long enough, and all sorts of things happen," he says. His life hasn't been like most, but in his work he tries to express parts of his personal experience that are universal. "In my art, I try to find a common bond between my life and others'," he says. He is more concerned with substance than any particular style, though much of his work depicts human and animal forms. A multimedia artist whose artistic ideas are driven by the materials he finds and uses, Randles describes himself as "a person who makes work out of junk." For example, his current series of paintings, called "Unspecified Figures From the Burden of Physics," is built from layer upon layer of discarded dressmaker's patterns papier-mâchéd to canvas.
The paintings address issues of oppression, stereotyping and control. The unified, androgynous forms in the pieces resemble DNA double helixes and are captured in the geometry of the dress patterns. Randles says the figures and their placement in the paintings speak about the human condition and humanity's tendency for putting people in a box.
"Once we invented the rectangle, we managed to box and cube everything and everybody," he says. "The rectangle is not found in nature, but it's man's single worst invention. It has him trapped."
Randles avoids cultural traps by relying on his independent vision. He says that when people today search for something to believe in, they should look inside themselves for a reason to exist. "Don't look for it from society," he says. "With six billion people on the planet, no one individual is needed."