Ignition Space in Fall River hosts inaugural art exhibit, 'Still Playing with My Crayons'

Do the end of the summer doldrums have you down? The antidote for a bit of minor league seasonal despondency might just be a visit to the inaugural exhibition at the South Coast’s newest art venue.

Sponsored by the Fall River Arts and Culture Coalition (FRACC), the 700-square-foot storefront gallery known as the Ignition Space is hosting “Still Playing with My Crayons,” featuring paintings, drawings and assemblages by hometown artist Jim Charette, and with 120 works of art, he isn’t wasting a square inch.

Charette is delightfully twisted and amusingly provocative as he delves deep into pop culture, mining the anarchy and inanity of the Three Stooges, Mad magazine, Saturday morning cartoons, underground comix and Devo before upping the game by topping it off with the off-kilter sensibilities of filmmakers John Waters and David Lynch.

As the title of the show suggests, Charette is indeed playing and metaphorically speaking, his toys are all over the room. He works with acrylics and aerosol paints, applying his imagery not only on stretched canvases or just simply tacked-to-the-wall segments, but also on decidedly unprecious substrates, such as corrugated cardboard and Lexan.

Real playthings — in the form of Barbie dolls, superhero action figures, toy animals and vehicles — are dismantled and Frankensteined back together and monochromatically repainted to make engaging and mildly disturbing “junk sculptures.”

One such assemblage is “Mr. Penguin’s Cabinet of Questionable Curiosities, #7,” featuring a diapered baby doll wearing a wig worthy of Ronald McDonald, with a dog lying on either side of it, all painted a slightly metallic shade of pink.

Many of Charette’s paintings seem to subtly comment on unclearly defined instances of social discomfort, such as “Black & White Man, Series 2 (#7)," in which three young men, looking like what would have been, in an earlier time, referred to as juvenile delinquents, smoke cigarettes in an alley and try to look tough. But they just appear buffoonish.

In “Black & White Man, Series 2 (#3),” against a sickening background shade of teal, a woman raises a crucifix while a mustachioed sheriff grins with a mouthful of teeth like Chiclets. Perhaps, meant to be personifications of Religion and Law, it is the man in the distance, holding two bunches of balloons, that really seems to be in charge. It is Absurdity that rules.

“Oh Shoore” features an older man, filtered butt dangling from his lips, wearing a pale blue shirt and white trousers, belted far too high up on his belly. His smirk and sideways glance suggests he is ogling someone. And the subject of his lechery might be the buxom, bikini-wearing blue-haired grandma in “Hanne’s Everlasting Gobstoppers,” in which even the barely teen boy behind her can’t help but gawk at.

It is entirely apropos, given Charette’s wonderful occasional forays in adolescent humor, that he would reference Willy Wonka fruit flavored candy from the early 70s in regard to the grandma’s bosom.

“DNA Nursery Crime” is a mystery. In an interior space, an old woman, with a forehead like a drive-in movie screen, wearing pink lipstick and avocado-green earrings, clutches a handbag. Outside the window, far from Oz, the Tin Man stares, maybe still in need of a heart.

A few of the works in the exhibition are collaborations between Charette and Heather Souza, his wife of seven years. One of the untitled pieces by them started with Souza laying a semi-abstract naturescape over which Charette plopped a gigantic man, a conjoined Tweedledum and Tweedledee had they been fathered by the Incredible Hulk.

“Collaboration #6 (Birthday Boy)” by Charette and Souza features an older man in a drab gray suit and a striped dunce cap against a spattering of bright hues behind. He clearly is not enjoying the party.

Years ago at the Kilburn Mills in New Bedford, Charette put on an exhibition called “Sad Little Boys” that featured elementary school brats, middle school bullies, high school punks and young men with disturbing thoughts.

This is a palette cleanser. It’s lighter and sweeter and more joyful. I am sure that Souza’s presence in Charette’s life has much to do with that.  It’ll chase away those doldrums.

But that said, I look forward to the promised somewhere-down-the-road sequel to “Sad Little Boys.”  It’s going to be called “Angry Old Men.”

“Still Playing with My Crayons” is on display at the Ignition Space, 341 S. Main St., Fall River, until Oct. 9, when there will be a closing event from 4 to 7 p.m. Gallery hours are from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Thursday and Friday, and from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m., Saturday and Sunday.

"Art Beat" is a weekly arts column by contributing writer Don Wilkinson.

This article originally appeared on The Herald News: Ignition Space hosts 'Still Playing with My Crayons' by Jim Charette