Opening For Robert Schlegel & Rob Schlegel: A Father & Son Collaborative Exhibition

Visual artist Robert Schlegel and his son, the poet Rob Schlegel, present individual and collaborative works for the gallery wall and shadow box tables. Exhibition runs through the month during daily business hours (8am-7pm M-F, 11am-5pm Sat-Sun)! Oregon artist Robert Schlegel is well known throughout the Northwest as an accomplished painter of rural landscapes and birds, in particular. At Glyph, he has constructed an array of perches for his sculptural birds and other assemblages interspersed with drawings, paintings and monotypes. Robert has shown widely in the Pacific Northwest and has been displayed in the Governor’s Office in Salem and the Oregon Biennial. Of his recent work he writes, “They started out as avian then morphed into the figurative and then into structures. As the work progressed I came to realize that it represents what I know, what I am, the environs in which I reside. As a biology student I prepared field studies of birds, removed the viscera, used corn meal to absorb the fluids, inserted cotton, stitched the birds together again, tagged and labeled. These tiny indicators of the health of the planet flit from tree to bush seeking seeds and nourishment around the house where I live. The materials reflect the rural environment in which I live. They are the agricultural ephemera that house animals, hay and assorted pieces of equipment with which to work the fields.” Rob Schlegel is the author of January Machine (Four Way Books, 2014) and The Lesser Fields (Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University, 2009). He coedits the Catenary Press. Winner of the 2014 Grub Street Poetry Prize, January Machine is a book-length poem comprised of sonnets and sonnet sequences interrupted by static. Rooted in the modern American moment, this poem seeks to understand the intersection of Whitman’s plurality and Oppen’s “shipwreck of the singular.” In the midst of geographic dislocation, the lyric “I” becomes a place; “I am the I undone, immersed / in perspective,” Schlegel writes. “I am an American sigh, a limit / of language, a limit of privilege, / in this excess, a thousand exits.” From January Machine: Around those whose agendas are national, I need to know what national is. Its use seems limited to the human condition, but its condition seems fueled by privilege. Providing a continent with names–historical, formal, or otherwise–gives it boundaries, but it’s the size of the country that overwhelms me. In each moment of silence a new consciousness. I want again that feeling of being engaged in the world–into language I am putting back my body.