John Fanning and John Winters put Chicken, Monkey and more on display at Alexander Lake Design

Hampton artist John Winters insists that his art has no meaning. “It just happens,” he says, motioning to the wall of his colorful canvases displayed at Alexander Lake Design in Dover. “There’s no inspiration. I don’t think of myself as an artist.” Winters’s attitude about art doesn’t put pressure on a viewer to interpret his unusual paintings a certain way. Made of household items and recycled materials, the work is displayed along with sculptures by his friend and artistic partner John Fanning, also of Hampton.

Recycling and re-using items plays a large role in both Winters’s and Fanning’s work. Winters’s sometimes whimsical and sometimes disturbing paintings incorporate materials like melted crayons, plastic doll hands, a DVD player lens and a syringe, skillfully put together on small canvases. Winters has been painting for three years, and Fanning has been making performance art, recording music and making films for seven. Also known as Massaccesi (an homage to Italian film director Aristide Massaccesi), Fanning says his primary focus is “appropriating things people usually discount or ignore.” Fanning also has a fondness for newspapers, supermarket packaging and other assorted types of garbage.

The duo’s most well known work is their videos, which feature two bath puppets named Chicken and Monkey, which Fanning’s mother bought at Linens ’N’ Things in 2001. The videos feature Fanning’s ambient electronic music in the background while Chicken and Monkey experience a variety of everyday things, including making coffee and going to the supermarket. Winters says the puppets “have taken on a life of their own.”

“It’s a way to make things a bit cute,” says Fanning, who says the puppets win people over with their charm. “It’s the way children perceive the world,” he says, pointing out that people can identify with the puppets. Fanning uses the word “anthropomorphizing” to describe the experience.

Aside from the endearing Chicken and Monkey puppets, Fanning’s sculpture also features cute stuffed animals ripped apart and neatly sewn together in a variety of arrangements. Dubbed “mash-up animals,” the pieces are clever, and their three-dimensional quality rounds out the exhibit. His piece “War Makes Life Rather Difficult (for Animals)” is a small wall hanging featuring fabric bombs falling on a stuffed parrot, while “War Makes Life Rather Difficult (for People)” shows two plastic dolls cowering in fear under a fiery blanket. “The Accidental Safari (Hatari!)” features a lion and cheetah stitched together as though copulating. Fanning’s sewing is neat and well-done, lending a touch of professionalism to the whole venture.

Winters’ mixed-media piece “(thought)” features a painted skull whose orifice holes are filled with odd objects like a syringe and a penis pencil eraser, with a DVD player lens planted in the middle of the skull.  “(Improvement Means Deterioration)” features a prominent hole burned in one corner of the canvas and a myriad of waxy, colorful lines. His lack of an artistic statement is a statement in and of itself. Winters thinks hard about viewer interpretation and what people will see when they look at his art, but prefers to remain mysterious as a creator.

Fanning, however, is very interested in the connection between the artist and the spectator. “Artists are not separate from regular people,” he says. “Artists shouldn’t be on a pedestal.” Fanning wants to have a dialogue with everyone who sees his art because he views the world as a connected place where all elements are intertwined. He works his recycled art into the natural world in the form of large installations made out of trash and other recycled items. In April of 2006 Fanning built an installation in La Spezia, Italy, titled “Mullstadt,” meaning “trash city” in German. With newspaper mountains and hospital bed liner lakes, the installation of miniature cities was on display for a week.

With his self-described punk rock background, Fanning has been performing and making music since the late 1990s. He and Winters regularly travel Europe, building installations out of recycled items and showing Chicken and Monkey videos. Fanning says that in Europe there is more of a division between the music scene and the visual art scene than in the U.S. He and Winters present their shows there as an artistic performance that is neither concert nor gallery showing, and the result draws people from both camps who may otherwise have never experienced something of the sort. “Experimental music is a lot more annoying to people than experimental art,” Fanning says.