Stick, stack, stuck

Wood is animate in "Stick People" at Storefront Art Projects

“English is a noun-based language,” Robin Wall Kimmerer writes in “Braiding Sweetgrass.” “Only 30 percent of English words are verbs, but in Potawatomi, that proportion is 70 percent.” She calls this “the grammar of animacy.” Anything with life may be represented by a verb, she writes. “To be a bay, to be a sandy beach, to be a Saturday, all are possible verbs in a world where everything is alive.”

To be a tree. To be a material for making.

The title of “Stick People” at Storefront Art Projects (through June 24) refers, perhaps, to the artists themselves, who all work with sticks in some way, framing the human experience with the living, malleable material of wood, like Patrick Dougherty or Rachel Beach.

But stick people artworks are also on view, with their own animated energy. Like Matt Neckers’ three-legged “Creature #5,” (above) all head and no body, with blocks covering his ears, a mouth full of smaller blocks, and a branchy antenna. What a blockhead. I could relate.

Or Rebecca Doughty’s “Sticks” series. Doughty scavenged sticks, sanded them, painted two eyes, a grimacing mouth. There’s a sly snake with a pug nose, a cat whose slender, single line of a body arcs upward in yearning, and a pair of humans full of comic pathos, one tall and straight, the other short and wilting (top). Doughty’s work seems descended from that of two late Boston artists – the figural sculptures Joseph Wheelwright made from wood and stone, and the angsty characters in Todd McKie’s wise, compassionate, funny paintings.

Maybe the Venn diagram sweet spot between trees and humans is that we can be ourselves together. Or humans can be at home and unguarded with a tree. Angsty. Neurotic. And feel cared for. Maybe just the touch of wood can help, or the process of working with it.

Imagine Beth Galston drilling holes into a zillion toothpicks and attaching one to the next, peg into hole, to make a web of them, called “Fragilities” (above). It hangs as precariously as a cobweb in one corner of the gallery. Or Damien Hoar de Galvan, patiently eating a thousand popsicles in order to construct “What About Now,” a stack of slotted and conjoined, occasionally painted popsicle sticks that suggests a valiant attempt at finicky order in the face of the delights of sugar, color, and touch. (Numbers here are pure estimates).

The woodiest piece in “Stick People” is Jesse Hickman’s “Construct,” a nearly six-foot-tall wall sculpture made of a row of planks, edges black. The neat, upright array is minimalist, like a Donald Judd work, but the elements are warped and knotty, and that imperfection feels human. They’re also rather like prison bars, yet recall a stand of trees, because they are not as uniform as prison bars and far more eloquent.

Then again, perhaps the woodiest is not wood at all, but Meg Alexander’s ink drawing “Snow Tree” (above) a column of rugged bark flecked and then blanketed with snow. Her exquisite attention and technique summon the tree’s verticality and texture; she places us face to face with it, as we would come upon it in the woods.

But it’s not fair to rank living things such as art (woody to woodiest), trees, and the act of making. The stick-figure parents, siblings, and pets that children draw mean the world to their makers. Anything with that kind of energy is alive, and “Stick People” is full of sticky, dainty, awkward, confounding life.