This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, March 7, 2011 - Once it was old-school computer mice. Then it was toilet seats, football pads and a parasol. After that, keyboards. But now it's all about boys as young as 8 making white paper guns.
Communication, technology and remnants of the past drive the art of Sarah Frost, 43. In her artist's statement, Frost quotes German philosopher Walter Benjamin: "To live is to leave traces."
"Maybe the whole thing, on one level, is a meditation on mortality," Frost said.
The Medium Is A Message
Born in Detroit and raised in Rochester, N.Y., Frost first found herself preoccupied with discarded items while playing outside her grandparents' Lake Erie cottage in northern Ohio. As the banks fell away each year, the earth gave up chunks of concrete, rusted steel and glass, which young Sarah fashioned into works of art using the clay soil.
Still, it was as a painter that she entered Southern Illinois University Edwardsville's MFA program in 2005, more than a decade after receiving a BFA in painting from Washington University. In graduate school, she had an epiphany: The medium itself has meaning.
Switching to sculpture, she traded paint and canvas for found objects that would have their own historical importance, resulting in works that are less about the artist and more about the art.
In one of her earlier sculptures, Frost wove her collection of vintage computer mice into a column. The result was "Column VI," which stirred questions about technology and communication from Mad Art Gallery goers.
And the toilet seats? In 2007, Frost combined the porcelain throne toppers with hundreds of other household items to create "White Wall," also exhibited at Mad Art.
Two years later, she tapped tens of thousands of keys to become parts of "QWERTY," which was first shown at Laumeier Sculpture Park. (The title refers to the six letters of the "home" keys on the left side of a standard keyboard.)
The keyboards all have stories: Computer keys embellished with pink nail polish conjure up the image of a teenage girl; the instructive "Check bottom of cart" written twice on a register documents a checker's duty to notice all merchandise accidently or intentionally not placed on the conveyer belt.
Don't look for any hidden messages spelled out in "QWERTY." There aren't any. Artistic principles, not nods to Scrabble, drive her placement decisions.
"It's more about space, height and tone -- warm and cool," Frost said. "But if I have a bunch of 'f' keys, for example, I will split them up. I don't want to put too many that are similar right next to each other."
The original "QWERTY" consists of roughly 120,000 keys. Testifying to that number is the mutilated-keyboard graveyard in Frost's studio, a garage behind her house in The Hill neighborhood of St. Louis. The keyboards came to her through garage sales, friends and acquaintances.
"People know I'm doing this," Frost said. "And things start finding me."
It's hardly a glamorous pursuit. But it does offer some unexpected lessons, like this one on office sanitation: If you're scarfing down a sandwich while reading over your keyboard, go get a plate.
"There is some really gross stuff under the boards when you pull the keys out," Frost said. "It's pretty nasty under there."
The Surprising Weight Of Paper Guns
Not all Frost's creations originate from rummage sales. The idea for her most recent work came from YouTube. There, she stumbled upon a cohort of young boys teaching viewers how to make sophisticated weapons with working parts -- out of paper. One 8-year-old's accomplishments were particularly compelling.
"I was so drawn in by how incredibly ingenious it was and that he figured it all out by himself, and made it out of the simplest of materials," Frost said. "Then he made a video about it and posted it; that's a lot of initiative and ingenuity."
With the help of interns, Frost spent months fashioning 300 weapons and related paraphernalia out of white paper. Pairing the artillery with still YouTube photos of the boys resulted in "Arsenal," originally exhibited at the Contemporary Art Museum. The exhibit can only be fully experienced in person -- like all Frost's work -- but you can get a feel for it watching a video taken by her husband.
"You just walk into this sea of white," Frost said. "Some people were really amazed that paper guns would affect them so much."
In April, "Arsenal" moves to a much different space than the CAM: New York City's PPOW gallery, for which Frost is creating a small-scale model. That required her to make 300 tiny, less detailed versions of the weapons.
Preparing for exhibits, working as a part-time graphic designer and parenting her almost 3-year-old son leave Frost little time for thinking about her next project, much less for gathering any necessary items.
"I'm not in a collecting phase," she said. "I'm in a cranking-out-work-to-meet-my-commitments phase."
Too 'smart' For St. Louis?
Frost has gotten treasure, taking other people's trash from garbage to gallery. "QWERTY" fetched $35,000 at the prestigious Miami International Art Fair, according to gallery owner William Shearburn, who represents Frost.
But Frost is not focused on financial reward, and in fact struggles with the idea of success, according to Joelle Mitchell, Frost's friend since their Wash U days.
"Making money off of her work and the success she's having create a big dilemma for her; her work is about the opposite of success," Mitchell said.
"She's not cashing in on some trend; she's not trying to impress some dealer," said Kim Humphries, Laumeier's director of exhibitions and collections. "Sarah is doing work that interests her; she's not making this work for anybody else,"
Frost's lack of concern for success may work out well because she's unlikely to realize her recognition potential here in St. Louis, according to Shearburn. The dealer said he could have sold "QWERTY" 10 times over in Miami.
"QWERTY" is a "modern-day mosaic" Shearburn said, just one example of the "smart work" Frost is making. But he says that in the Midwest, Frost and other contemporary artists don't enjoy the kind of commercial success as those in larger, coastal cities.
"My audience in St. Louis is limited; it always has been," Shearburn said. "It's a numbers game. There are x number of people interested in contemporary art and who can also afford to participate on that level."
But Frost, who has no plans to leave St. Louis unless her husband's publishing job takes them to another location, noted that big-city artists are also burdened by a high cost of living. In addition, for her, success is all about the creative process. Even if she weren't a sculptor or a painter, she'd still channel her creative energies into some sort of project.
"I'm always making something," Frost said. "If I weren't doing this, maybe I'd be decorating cakes."
