See it, read it, dig it: Art show delves into the mind of Robert Park

A universe was born on the day Bath artist Robert Park found a ball-toss carnival game panel in the trash at a local school.

The resulting work of art, “Game Changer,” is one of about 25 phantasmagoric Park pieces on display at artist and metal sculptor David Such’s north Lansing gallery, Struk Studio, through “at least the end of February,” Such said.

The plywood relic fired up Park’s imagination. He looked at the holes in the panel, rummaged through his extensive globe collection (of course he has one) and found globes that fit the holes.

“The concept grew from there,” he said.

He glued thousands of tiny number eights over the globes, suggesting that a massive digital glitch is enveloping the universe, wiping out the old analog order. The big hole in the middle is festooned with a delicate, rainbow-colored web of wires. Look past the web into the void beyond and a mirror-like surface bounces your face back at you, upside down.

“That’s a game changer,” the artist said with a sly grin.

“Calabi-Yau Boogie Woogie” twists the segmented lines of Piet Mondrian, one of Park’s favorite artists, into the multidimensional world of …

Park is best known in the Lansing-area art world for “The Blue Loop,” a 1,000-foot-long array of upcycled blue objects that pulsates vividly amid the green shrubs and woods near his home in Bath.

A few of the works in the Struk Studio show delve into Park’s obsession with the color blue, but the exhibit ranges throughout his career and life — more than 50 years of quiet, synapse-crackling creativity.

Park has had a few exhibits over the years, including a show called “Quantum Entanglement” at MSU in 2017, but most of his artistic energy goes into solitary, meticulous investigation of the nexus between form, texture, space and text.

“Some people would call me an outsider, which can be seen as a putdown,” he said. “But if you look at art history, some of the greatest artists were outsiders in their time.”

He put hundreds of hours into each of the works, creating what he calls a “dual experience.” From a few feet away, harmonious fields of color and dynamic, undulating forms arrest the eye. Lean forward to within a few inches, and the artworks reveal worlds within worlds.

Most are embedded with hundreds of tiny objects, from rusty coins and miniature dolls to puzzle pieces, costume jewelry and natural objects like pebbles and platter-like chunks of bracket fungus, which are dried and lacquered, of course.

The art not only begs to be seen but also to be read, only not in a linear, literary fashion. Every inch is loaded (sometimes overloaded) with puns, philosophical nuggets, references to scientific concepts and art history — whatever was going through Park’s head as he worked. The verbiage is clipped from art and science magazines and other sources and spliced into compound phrases and puns that range from fun juxtapositions like “bookworm” and “wormhole” to dad-joke groaners like “Frank Lloyd Wrong.”

“Art should have a sense of humor,” Park said.

Park began his avid, lifelong study of art and art history with two years at Northwestern Michigan College in Traverse City before coming to Michigan State University to study graphic design.

He quickly found out that painting and sculpture are his true loves. He got a bachelor’s of fine arts from MSU in 1969, maintains a studio in Bath and teaches from time to time.

Along the way, his art has undergone several stylistic changes. At first, he was into landscape-like forms and mandalas, or geometric designs from Buddhist and Hindu traditions. Later, his art began to snake off the flat canvas and writhe, thrust and twirl its way into real space.

“The Four Seasons,” like most of the works in Park’s show, contains hundreds of found objects and hidden references to scientific ideas and art …

“I moved from the illusion of dimension to actual dimension,” he said.

“Thing Thought” begins with a tan expanse of canvas on wood, but the flat substrate is animated by grape vines that swirl into the room and form eddies and sinkholes, sub-worlds of contrasting color and texture.

Park loves the sinuous shapes of grape vines and spent many hours selecting, shaping, stripping, drying and varnishing them.

In the center of the gallery crouches a blue sculpture that tangles around itself like a Mobius strip multiplied by 700. The title, “Calabi-Yau Boogie Woogie,” is a riff on Piet Mondrian’s famous 1942 canvas “Broadway Boogie Woogie.”

Park reads art journals and magazines “fanatically” and keeps up with new ideas in physics, psychology and other scientific fields. (A Calabi-Yau manifold is a multidimensional concept from advanced physics, a string-theory brain wringer I won’t dare to try and summarize here.)

He named a quartet of artists that he treasures as “talismans,” even though his art bears no obvious resemblance to any of their work. He loves Jackson Pollock for his “force of energy,” René Magritte for his humor and wit, Piet Mondrian for his formal innovations and Vincent van Gogh “just for the spirit of the artist, putting your whole life into art.”

Robert Rauschenberg is another big inspiration.

“I’m fascinated by the materials he used, mixed media using found objects,” Park said. “Some people say, ‘That’s junk,’ but he would find the beauty in it.”

Some of the works in the Struk Studio retrospective have been hanging in Park’s studio for decades.

“I miss them already,” he said. They’re part of my brain.”