An Artist Play-Acts His Way to Something Real
Ian Page explores the edges of things
2024-2025 Visual Arts Fellow Ian Page, Photo: Emily Schiffer
Back in his FAWC studio, it’s not always clear how Page’s theories align with the objects he makes. In one corner, he’s making perfume. Nearby, there’s a rack he might use to display some of his homemade apple and hibiscus wine. Most of the floor space is occupied by rollers from a wallpaper facility in Hyannis that closed in the 1960s — Page bought them on Craigslist when he first arrived in Provincetown.
“A really functional way for me to get into a new place is to go through its garbage,” he says. In a recent group exhibition of FAWC fellows at PAAM, Page displayed the rollers in a three-dimensional grid. He plans to expand the sculpture for his showcase exhibition.
For Page, the objects represent a “lapsed mid-20th-century aspirational quality.” The rollers are remnants of middle-class efforts at home decoration — “the dirty industrial backside of this fictional life,” he says. When he started assembling them into structures, he noticed they “started to take on a kind of punishing quality,” appearing almost like a torture device. The meaning of the work is fluid and exists between the viewer’s impressions, the form itself, and Page’s intentions, but even those intentions are negotiable.
– Abraham Storer
To read the full article in The Provincetown Independent, visit here.The
