“Trying Something New”

“Flatbed Collage #3”
New Work by Doug Calisch
Introduction by Steve Charles

Doug Calisch is a sculptor, photographer, and furniture designer/maker, but he’s also a teacher. And during my time working at Wabash College I learned more from him about storytelling than from anyone else.

I arrived there soon after Doug had returned from a trip to Appalachia, where he’d met these fascinating “outsider” artists and collected all sorts of stuff he would use to create assembled pieces like nothing I’d ever seen before. When I interviewed him then about that journey I realized he was listening better, being more open-minded, and often finding more intriguing and honest stories than I was in my writing.

Ten years later when Doug was making art with cancer patients for a project called The Cancer Wall, writer Kyle Nickel said: “He did not just make art; he let others trade their possessions for a chance to participate in the process. Maybe they learned that creation and healing are never far apart.”

So I started to pattern my approach after Doug’s, not rushing to conclusions, being more collaborative, looking around to see what else I might find, coming home and looking at what I had and letting wonder seep into it all. And then, beginning.

That was great for me, but coming at Doug’s work for the story it told, or, worse, the story each object told, or the process he went through to make it, got in the way of my fully experiencing his work as art. There was something about being able to walk around those 3-D pieces, or hold one of his photographs in my hand and covet it to publish in our magazine, that made me want to ask “Where’d you find this?” or “What is this?” or “Who gave this to you?” My distraction drove him a little nuts, but he’d generously answer my questions on the condition that I understand that “those answers don’t really matter.” Then he’d add, “I want you to find your own story, your own meaning, in this.” Eventually I began to do that, let the art come to me instead of forcing the story, and that may be the most important lesson from Doug I’ve applied to my own work and life.

So I was excited when Doug told me he was “trying something new: composing found materials directly on a flatbed scanner, then scanning (“photographing”) them at extreme high resolution so they can be exhibited at four to five times their original size.” I asked to see a couple for our New Platypus Review (monotremes love art), and the one we’re posting here really got to me.

Because of our image-size limitations, the Platypus can’t really do the work justice. But I’m excited to share it with you anyway, hoping we’ll get to see it full scale someday. For me it blurs the lines between Doug’s found object sculptures and photography. At first I thought it was a painting! Something about compressing that space moved me immediately, took me straight to new experience that didn’t require any other context, drew me into what was right there in front of me.

It also freed me for a moment from the tendency that sometimes curses me as a writer—that need to know the story. This piece moves me, washes over and through me, and it’s enough.