Feature
Photo Essay: Randy Regier's NuPenny
Randy Regier is an artist who grew up in Oregon and is now based in Portland, Maine. His art depicts the American dream through toys and space craft. He's had several installations, including the 2008 Boonaroo Festival, and you can check out photos or videos of his installations/works. He's also close to The Harvey Girls heart partially because he did the cover for our album Blabber 'n' Smoke, but mostly because he's a great guy who has been able to follow his dream and we love him. Below is Randy's dedication to his former home of Oregon and explanation of his newest project, NuPenny.
A Long Distance Dedication from Randy in Maine, to Oregon in Oregon.
"Both science and poetry proceed, in part, by making pictures of what we cannot see (or what merely escapes our notice), by attributing corporeal properties to inscrutable events." Daniel Tiffany
In 1971, when I was seven, we moved from Newton, Kansas, to a farm house in the Waldo Hills near Silverton, Oregon. Shortly, we moved to Pratum (from the Latin prado, for meadow), Oregon, nestled in rolling alfalfa, corn and berry fields between Salem and Silverton. My father was both the sole farm hand (a production egg farm with 10,000 laying hens and alfalfa hay) to the farmer whose land we lived upon, and also was an auto painter. My mother worked for a bookbinder in Central Howell, and indeed still does. We lived in a sigle-wide mobile home perched at the edge of an alfalfa field, an early '60s vintage “New Moon.” My dad painted it brown with a bright orange door, this should indicate to you it was the 1970s. We upgraded to a new double-wide a few years later, which was very exciting.
We never owned a TV, but we had JC Penney's catalogues (where I studied “anatomy”), National Geographic magazines (undersea treasure! - and more anatomy), and a legion of books (The Chronicles of Narnia, The Island of the Blue Dolphins, The Barbary Pirates - my favorites). When my older sister and I would get home from Pratum school (three rooms, 1st through 8th grades), often we would listen to OPB, where Bob Roberts and John McDonald would take turns reading on-air between 4 and 5:00, until the iconic chime heralding All Things Considered would signify the beginning of the evening. One very good day when the gods were in my favor I found a much rained upon and tattered Penthouse magazine in the ditch on the way home, thrown from a car no doubt. New information was gleaned from that that was previously unavailable.
In short, the world that I believed awaited me as an adult was constructed early in my young mind from the stories I received in text and pictures from magazines, books and of course, the ever present radio. The soundtrack to this autobiography could be traced to 62 KGW, and later I rocked as much as was possible for a scrawny white boy to whatever short list of A sides KGON was repeating that day. If you are from Oregon, this hopefully will convince you of the veracity of my story. The effect of all these influences was an entire universe of fantastic objects in my mind, a warehouse of things desired.
As a young man I wished nothing more than to translate these images and stories into constructed objects, but I sorely lacked the capacity to do so. There were ample tools and materials on the farm, and my father and his employer even built a craft studio adjacent to our trailer house, inspired no doubt by the Foxfire and Sunset books they were reading at the time. But try as I might, all I attempted to make fell far short of the much more advanced capabilities of my imagination. I always seemed to be reaching for something beyond my grasp, even then.
It is 2010 now, and I have perhaps made these things at last; physical manifestations of the “inscrutable events” of my childhood; four decades and 3,000 miles distant from their point of origin. It may be the case that all I have accomplished with NuPenny is to posthumously grant myself the desires of my childhood. I have constructed an entire toy store wherein each toy and object is a referent, an adherent and interpretation of the literary, lyric and poetic works that have made my life rich, and for which I am grateful. But then I have locked the door and walked away, leaving it unexplained in a town in which I have never lived for others completely unknown to me to understand on their own terms. So be it. However, granted that it may have been constructed by myself, I will confess to another wish: I truly hope that somehow it has been authored by us.
Thank you for asking me to write about this, and thank you for reading this far. If I may be so bold, I will conclude by quoting a single line from the poet Stuart Kestenbaum's work, Prayer In The Strip Mall, Bangor, Maine:
“I Love You.”
Randy Regier
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