Tiny Gallery Tells Big Story

Soon after her marriage broke up, artist, writer, and Co-Op High teacher Mindi Englart was going through wedding pictures, diary entries, and divorce papers. She had the natural impulse to treat them like garbage. Then she had a better idea.

She shredded them and turned all the colorful shaggy pulp into art.

The inventive and, for Englart, restorative result is on display at the Tiny Gallery. Three vitrines rise inside a colorful totem in front of the Creative Arts Workshop on Audubon Street.

Each of the five four-by-four inch cubes in the show, called Ephemera, is composed of shredded papers, wedding photos, and assorted memorabilia – ingredients of the defunct marriage recycled with each cube created according to a recipe, Englart said.

Some cubes have more photo material, others more divorce documents. Others have more journal entries when love was on the ascent, or the descent. Englart titled each piece accordingly – and ironically – by turns elegiac and self-help in tone: ​“Not Clutter. Not Trash. Art,” ​“Rewrite the Narrative,” ​“This Is How the Light Gets In.”

The five pieces are part of a larger series of 30 that Englart created and showed at her pop-up studio at the Grove in 2012. She received a prestigious grant from the Surdna Foundation for the project. The original proposal was to shred and pulp the painful papers, turning them into clean new sheets on which Englart would create an artist’s book, a new narrative.

However, as she looked at the zig-zaggy, shaggy, texturally interesting balls of shreds, she halted herself on the road of destruction. ​“The shred was cool, each different, so I put them in different bags, labeled them,” Englart said.

Then she sought out two artistic mentors whose work involves making their own papers: Paulette Rosen and Jennifer Davies.

The result was Ephemera, from which Englart said she sold six pieces, including one to the Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library at Yale for its special collection dealing with artists’ books.

And did it work? Was Englart able to use art to write a new narrative?

“For me it’s alchemy,” she replied. After working on the project, ​“I was a new person. I ended up with something different, positive, and essential. I took something hard and turned it into something beautiful.”

The physical process of doing the work was itself liberating. ​“It was so freeing. I made a mess of it. I cleaned up the mess. It was awesome. I loved it.”

But healing isn’t the ultimate aim of Englart’s artistic practice. ​“I’m always trying to take disparate things and make of them something more than the sum of their parts,” she explained.

That approach is taking her on to her next project, an ambitious conceptual work that has to do with ​“re-framing the narrative” of the art-making process in society as a whole.

“Artists don’t know how to value their work. One hour of art-making should be valued at the same rate as other professions,” she said.

Therefore Englart’s project somehow is going to involve taking the detritus of higher-paying professions, making art out of it, and then selling it back to the detritus creators – at a profit.

Englart will be on hand at CAW’s winter student show this Sunday, Feb. 1, 2 – 4 p.m.