On display at the Rice Art Gallery, Charlie Roberts’ Mambo Jambo: Cabinet of the Cosmos is a sinister installation exploring the human and animal worlds. Built in the gallery from trees torn down for Rice University’s construction projects, Roberts’ work is a masterful set packed with detail.
"I am a maximalist at heart," Roberts said in a release, "and love to pack things to the gills."
In the forefront of the exhibit, two towering wolf-like wooden creatures with tree-limb legs stand center guard in front of a giant cabinet. Adding to their menacing presence is the choice of construction an assembly of stripped wooden sheets with splintered jagged edges. On either side stand primitive humans similarly constructed. Even the floor of the exhibit has been laid in a pattern of woodwork.
The cabinet itself has two wings jutting from each side adorned with a grid of watercolor paintings. On the right are human caricatures, faces covering multiple eras of history and fiction. The paintings on the left depict animals – birds, bears, wolves and a rabbit head that resembles that nightmarish character from Donnie Darko.
At the very top of the cabinet rest wooden cutouts of human faces, eerily reminiscent of the shrunken heads made by Amazonian tribes. At the center of these cutouts is the sculpture a woman’s head – maybe Mother Nature – with her arms reaching toward the ceiling.
The massive cabinet doors contain black and white murals of death and violence between humans and animals.
These doors can be opened by knobs in the center, a protruding head of a devil or vampire. Inside the cabinet are three shelves holding animals of fractured wooden design. In the middle, a human infant emerges from between the legs of an ape.
The exhibit captures the precarious relationship between man and nature. It’s immediately ominous and enthralling. Roberts spares no effort in minutiae, impressive considering it was created onsite in a three-week period. During this time Roberts could be seen toiling over logs, stripping and cutting them with an axe. The watercolor paintings were the only pieces he brought with him.
Roberts came up with the term "mambo jambo" to describe his installation. He said in a release that it’s based on an association with his music in his bluegrass band, voodoo and gumbo – where everything is blended together. Mambo Jambo fits many stories and objects into a small area, he said.
Roberts delights in creating intricately detailed and complex pieces. His painting "Picasso’s Tomb," done in 2006, is a tribute to the artist containing hundreds of renditions of Picasso’s work inside an architectural space.
Roberts is a painter and sculptor and has had solo exhibitions at galleries in New York, Los Angeles and Vancouver. He was born in Hutchinson, Kan. in 1983 and lives and works in Asker, Norway.
Mambo Jambo: Cabinet of the Cosmos is Roberts’ first site-specific installation. It is featured at the Rice Art Gallery through March 30.
