Blasto - the artistic team of David Cohen and Richard Noguiera, have been stirring things up at Williamsburg's Open Ground. Since they?re responsible for some of our favorite work recently, Beekiller decided to spend an afternoon with Dave and Richard recently, and chat about their process, the difficulties and stimuli of collaboration, and the best way to freeze 50 pounds of ice.

One could call them the Laurel and Hardy of art making, but maybe without the slapstick it doesn't make sense. When you meet the awesome power of Blasto in person, what you actually get is two outgrown elves, who playfully push and execute some funny, sincere and thoughtful business. Obviously, as a team, they create art that speaks for them both, yet one has to understand some individual background to know where each of them are from and where they meet.

Dave is the painter-painter guy, who comes with the formal art experience, a painting residency in New Mexico, and a portfolio of medium-sized gestural, abstract, Terry Winters-inflected oil paintings. Rich, on the other hand, is the one who spent a year painting out a red brick wall, only to paint it back in, by hand a brick at a time. He says he always sort of "thought about things." Their individual experiences and attitudes toward art are what inform the Blasto ethic of playfully ironic installations that express concerns with the community, tradition, and culture of the suburbs. While David's concern for the environment grows out of his interest in landscape and the interpretation of it in the abstract form, Rich's combination of impulsive intellect and spatial imagination have found its shape in the series of imaginary architectural drawings he's been working on for years.

Drawing from the irony of pop culture, as well as the poetry of physical phenomena, Blasto executes work that is a series of self-evident facts, rather than a representational type of art. Of course, there?s a certain organic sense in which those facts are laid out, but the best of their pieces seem to work like a perfectly tuned concert machine, viewers immediately being aware of a unique and thorough intelligence at work.

One recent work, showcased at the OpenGround's last exhibit, connects the physics of gravity and melting to issues of community waterfront preservation. A three tiered grille shelf, supporting three rows of frozen water letters, spell out "On the Waterfront." The space directly underneath the dripping shelves is covered with earth and debris collected on the site of the currently abandoned and deteriorating Williamsburg waterfront. The ice starts melting the minute it is taken out of a variety of beverage coolers, and that moment signals a beginning of the installation/performance/sculpture event. It?s replete with loud crashes (as the letters collapse underneath their weight), the smell of wet earth, and Dave and Rich running around, cleaning the muddy mess collecting at the bottom. In a piece like this, all the senses are suddenly harnessed to real time phenomena and the possibilities of meaning they actively uncover.

Through a clever manipulation of these elements and their position in strategic relation to each other, a conceptual drive-train links the presence of audience in the gallery, its effect on the temperature of the room, and the constant pull of gravity with the faltering state of the waterfront, overpopulation, and preservation efforts, making a biting, and somewhat wistful, social commentary.

Aiming at immediate emotional/physical response, Blasto demonstrates their notion of good art arrives at the intersection of perceptual facts and a sound conceptual logic. Working mostly with sculpture, their installations manifest a certain readymade/found art aesthetic that lends itself to be seen in context of popular experiences and familiar traditions. What sets them apart is a particular warped view of the possibilities of the technology and social interactions--a bit like Mark Twain, their recurring sarcasm is a front for the perpetual chagrin of the pragmatics.

Blasto can be contacted at blasto_art@yahoo.com. OpenGround's located at 252 Grand St., between Driggs and Roebling, in Williamsburg, NY, and operates mostly on weekends.