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Look & Listen
Hamilton Magazine
Summer, 1998
Cross Purposes
By Jacqueline Lealess
If the name Michael Allgoewer doesn’t ring a bell, there’s a good chance you’ll recognize his artwork. In the past ten years, Allgoewer’s distinctive sculptures have been exhibited in just about every venue in Hamilton. Working primarily in assemblage - forming sculptures from cast-off objects found around town, essentially redeeming the debris of an industrial city - the recognition factor should at least register in terms of his materials, if not for the sum of the parts.
And maybe you connect with them in a more primal way than just visual memory. On their own, Allgoewer’s materials are ordinary, everyday objects. Taken together, they are transformed into something of metaphorical import, by way of the language of the subconscious - symbols that transcend words, culture, and the various other barriers that impede comprehension.
"I’ve always been attracted to archetypal forms-sometimes I don’t know why I’m drawn to these images," the soft-spoken Allgoewer explains. "The cross, for one – which recurs a lot in my work – is a powerful thing, and we react to it. Historically, it goes really far back, beyond Christianity. "
And then, just sometimes, he likes to mess with our heads. Assembling works of art in the places you’d least expect - like his Trespass series, which placed various Allgoewer sculptures in the wide open industrial wasteland just east of the city’s core, tearing down traditional ideas of what art is and where art is meant to be shown. He plans to continue the series in the fall. And this summer, Watch for Didactic Museum, "a shifting collection of sites and objects defined by didactic panels placed in specific contexts", in collaboration with Margaret Martineau. "Studies have shown that the average person spends more time reading the didactic panels in an art gallery than looking at the work itself," he offers. So the plan is to attach panels to everyday objects around Hamilton. And maybe in the process – if only just for a split second – it might give us pause to think about the things that pass for so much wallpaper in the mind’s eye.
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