Castoff creations no Longer junk  1996 Eugene, Oregon Register Guard

NEWPORT - Call it CRAP. All caps. It's an acronym, standing for Coastal Recycling Artists Project - an exhibit running through March 5 in the black-walled Studio Theater at the Newport Performing Arts Center. And It's definitely not your usual coastal gallery show.No seascapes here. The acronym is well-chosen, because each of perhaps 50 pieces from five different coastal artists are constructed of - well, crap. The kind of stuff you would find in the landfill, drifted ashore on the beach, or way back on the shelves of moldy-smelling Highway 101 "junque" shops. 'Construction pieces," they're called. Artwork made of incongruous combinations of weathered plywood, paint-peeling boards, old car parts, junk linoleum, plastic whatevers. It's the kind of stuff archaeologists 2,000 years from now will use to define the 20th century. Some of the art pieces make you laugh. Nearly all seem .to have a message. Sometifnes it's hard to figure out what that message is - though an underlying theme running through the show is that the products of today's throw-away society can be recycled into something creative and new. But it's more than that. Much more, says 66-year-old Waldport artist James Frankfort, who conceived the idea of the show and then made it happen with the cooperation of the Oregon Coast Council for the Arts, which oversees the performing arts center. Other contributing artists are Robert Coghill of Slletz, Sarah Dailing of Florence, Chris OKeefe of Lincoln City and Christina Platz of Newport. Frankfort, an intense artist who wears his long, gray hair in a pony tail, is dead serious when he says an even deeper theme to the show of experimental art is understanding your inner self."It's an inner-spiritual thing," he says. "Understanding man's position on this planet." And what more appropriate way to do that, he says, than artwork fabricated from humankind's castoffs. To his way of thinking, the stuff In CRAP lends to that understanding. Even the silver-sprayed shoes - one loafer, one tennis shoe - worn by a couple of detached silver-sprayed limbs, the kind that come from trees. Or the splintered board studded with bent nails, with a multicolored imitation egg perched on the top. People viewing the show hear an assortment of sounds as diverse as what their .eyes are seeing. - the rumble of subways, clanking factory noises, the din of screaming sirens and bigcity traffic. All were recorded by Frankfort at locations around the world. One of 11 Frankfort pieces in the exhibit features a weathered piece of plywood, on which the rusted dashboard from a vintage car and old movie projector reel are mounted. It's entitled "Mona Now."  "It's a statement on da Vinci's Mona Lisa," Frankfort explains. "This is today's Mona Lisa - which is an accumulation of the past." Far-out stuff from a deep thinker. But, Frankfort says the kind of art in CRAP, is nothing new. The same sort of ideas are found in some of Picasso's paintings, or in abstract creations by Dadaist artists dating back to the 1920s.What Is unusual, he says, is to see a complete show of this kind of experimental art in Oregon- especially in a small coastal community. "This is a first for Newport," he says. Frankfort, a Lincoln County resident since 1974, was born In Belgium, attended art school in New York and has been a professional artist most of his life. Sharon Morgan, executive director for the Oregon Council for the Arts, says he is an asset to the local art community. "One thing I think is extraordinary is when you have a long-lived artist not only encouraging new and younger artists," she says, "but finding new ways of expression in their own work. I just find that terribly exciting." Though definitely out of the mainstream, Frankfort likes his niche in Newport's diverse coastal art community. He says his style is still evolving. "I am what I am," he says. "I'm satisfied with my work. But I have to go beyond."     back

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