Outside a familiar object, an old-fashioned public bus, familiarly called “old yellow” by some city employees for its yellow roof-line. Inside a space that is transformed, not a corridor and not exactly a room, but something theatrical, playful, set apart from the normal patterns of life. This is one notion of what art should do: create a site for free thought, free association, and the free floating play of the mind and the emotions.

The central idea behind Mass TransArt is to introduce a pleasurable concept of art into an ordinary space. We envision the bus fitting smoothly into the everyday fabric of downtown activities: sight-seeing, shopping, working, and eating. We seek to create a doorway into another place without disrupting any of the day-to-day flow. We hope to normalize the art experience, to suggest an option other than requiring the purposeful allocation of time for culture, setting aside an afternoon for an exhibition or making reservations months in advance to spend the day at a museum like the Getty. But, what if there were a way to enjoy art like you enjoy an ice cream cone, for fifteen minutes between taking your shoes to be reheeled and shopping for a new lamp? Mass TransArt, our bus-as-gallery, is an attempt to do just that.

Seven artists have collaborated to create the Moveable Feast that is at once exhibition, installation, and presentation strategy. Some of the artists’ creations are distinct objects: sculpture, paintings, prints, or photographs. Other parts of their work cannot be separated so easily, whether because they were designed and produced jointly or because they work together so completely. Originally the artists were asked to respond to a specific and familiar theme from historical art: the opulent banquet still life (Pronk still-leben in the original Dutch), which first appeared in paintings made for Dutch middle-class patrons in the 17th century (the Baroque period). These painted displays of extraordinary delicacies and riches sometimes held symbolic meanings. For example, many observers believe these still lifes were meant to remind viewers of the temporary nature of worldly goods and thus the fragility of life. Other historians have shown that many of the unusual fruits and other products displayed represented Holland’s impressive international trading network. As a commentary on painting and seeing, these still lifes demonstrate the potential pleasures of art, its celebration of all the senses, and its ability to evoke memories and expectations, states of being and desires.

The compositions, characteristic motifs, and affects of these historical paintings inspired several of the artists in Mass TransArt: A Moveable Feast. Their responses range from elaborating on details to reenacting their overall complexity. Jane Callister’s wall looks as if it might have been transported directly out of a Baroque palace, or perhaps a Las Vegas reconstruction. Dick Dunlap’s Crossroads + invokes a gathering of people, a cocktail party heard and felt but not seen. Phil Argent’s large-scale painting and Joan Tanner’s big light box photographs comment wryly on the genre as a whole. They analyze their components and re-present them in thoroughly modern forms. Argent’s oversize license plate lays out all the elements of still life in the abbreviated code of car culture. Rather than luscious foods and flowers, random scrap materials make up Tanner’s still-life compositions, but their original appearance has been transformed by a coating of rubberized paint.

Keith Conley's furniture-based sculpture takes its cue from the heavy green drapery painted in Baroque backgrounds. He compounds its "theatrical" references—the classic film title, the gold fringe—with a popcorn popper, which signifies food as well as (movie) theatres. Keith Puccinelli’s works form an extended meditation on how the Dutch Baroque still life relates to contemporary habits, especially our culturally specific expectations and beliefs about food and its packaging. R. H. has encased artificial flowers discretely in little plastic boxes and installed them throughout the interior, just as flowers in still life paintings are a unifying device.

On one level, Mass TransArt is an experiment in seeing how many ways we can deviate from precedent: an experimental type of space, an unfixed venue, a subject interpreted in unexpected ways. Many of the artists have been inspired to try materials or techniques that depart from their known professional art work. On another level this project is a tribute to ?place.? Just as Dutch still lifes celebrated the opulence available in contemporary, that is 17th-century, Holland, so too the art of Site Work 3 celebrates the sensory cornucopia of our local environment. Santa Barbara county is the site of extraordinary agriculture, with heirloom plants that recall the past and specialized produce grown only in a few other exotic locales. Food is important to Santa Barbara, it is part of the county’s identity (best known through our frequent farmers markets), represents a major component of the economy, and defines much of the Santa Barbara style. We hope this exhibition shows that not only can one think of food as art, but that art can be a kind of food. Finding art in the middle of an ordinary day and on a busy retail street in a vehicle of public mass transit we hope will provide unexpected pleasures, refreshment, and nourishment.

Elizabeth A. Brown, Chief Curator