Ken Riaf. Illustration B. McGilvray
Which Ken Riaf have you met? Perhaps the artist, who builds small assemblage boxes, detailed and suggestive.
Maybe it’s Riaf the champion of other artists, representing painters Jon Sarkin or Samuel Feinstein, supporting their work and showing it on the walls of his own offices.
Maybe Ken Riaf the playwright, whose successful production last year at the Gloucester Stage Company, “My Station in Life,” captured the cluttered and madcap life of the late radio man Simon Geller.
Or maybe it’s the lawyer and teacher Ken Riaf, who has specialized in public interest and ocean aquaculture law, and teaches about his profession as well at Endicott College.
There are more than a few Ken Riafs.
“If you’re doing a lot of things, that doesn’t mean you’re not focused on those things,” Riaf says. “Driving a bus. Going fishing. Those people are lasered in on what they do. When I’m practicing law, helping people, I’m focused on that. Or on teaching. The boxes. Or writing.
“Whatever I’m doing I’m right keen focused on it,” he says. “But I like to shift from time to time. It helps you actually. You go blurry if you continually focus on one thing. Change perspective, and you come away fresher.”
That fresh perspective helps Riaf make things—different things. And he’s made things that people like for decades. Riaf collaborated with filmmaker Henry Ferrini and others for an earlier documentary on Geller, “Radio Fishtown,” produced in 1990. Riaf also wrote the screenplay to the Charles Olson film, “Polis is This,” another collaboration with Ferrini that has won multiple documentary awards.
His boxes—he hesitates to call his work assemblage—will be on view in an exhibition at Gloucester’s Trident Gallery this August. It’s great acknowledgement for someone who says—“I usually just try to see what things work together.” Riaf previously showed his boxes at Jane Deering Gallery, and led a workshop at the Peabody Essex Museum on his practice.
His creations are small, with comic juxtapositions or gentle themes stated. Riaf often incorporates legal ephemera into the boxes—century-old leases, or letters.
“I call it ‘Things I make, that people like,’ ” Riaf says. “I started doing these ten years ago, maybe more. I go through periods of hard work, and then let it sit.”
The recent success of “My Station in Life” at the Gloucester Stage not only brought a local personality to life for those that knew him, but captured Geller’s crustiness in a way that translated universally. “It’s kind of like a Charles Olson thing,” he says. “You look at this small thing, and then extrapolate universally.” This July, Gloucester Stage Company will read his “Remember Me Tuesday,” his next manuscript, which evokes the late Dan Ruberti, the perpetual (and hapless) candidate for mayor of Gloucester. “It’s about a fellow in town who runs all the time but never wins,” Riaf says.
Staging a Play
The experience with “My Station in Life” at the Gloucester Stage opened Riaf to new experiences as a writer. “You find out what’s involved in the process,” he says. “And to see the audience react to it, in ways that you may not have anticipated. A couple thousand people in three weeks. It was gratifying to have that reception.”
“A lot of these things in write, and you don’t know what they are going in,” he says. “You follow the line. Sometimes you have an idea, other things you see. What happens is not by accident, but like pathways. You put it down and come back to it later, to see if you like it.
“Then you see these people react to this thing that’s been created. I had folks come up to me, strangers,” he says. “This one woman was choked up, she said, ‘I knew Simon.’ Then this guy came up and said that it was the funniest thing. So I guess that’s what you want—people rocking back and forth between laughing and crying.”
“It’s the same thing with the boxes,” he says. “When people say, ‘I put it on the dresser and I see it every morning, and I think about it’—how you interact with it, there’s stuff you can get out of that. Like a first reaction you have to art, you always have that reaction. And then it’s reconsidered, and you have the subsequent thing. There’s a space between the two, and that space is very interesting.”
Finding Fulfillment
Talking about creativity, and especially in the various ways that Riaf explores it, eventually leads to a conversation about fulfillment. With so many different avenues to pursue, which one brings the most happiness—if any?
“You’re happy when Gloucester Stage—when Walsh (director Bob Walsh) and the actors—immerse themselves in it, the professional way that they did,” he says. “It’s quite a thing to take it from the page to the stage. You’re happy when Matt (Swift, director of Trident Gallery) says, ‘I’ll give you a show in the gallery.’ I don’t know if that motivates you from the start, but there’s a satisfaction.
“I guess if you show someone something, or tell people something that would bring to light something that was important, maybe meaningful, that’s part of it,” he says. “And if by doing that it takes someone’s perspective, and puts it out into the world. Maybe it’s positive, maybe not. But if you can get somebody to take a look at it, and if they say they hadn’t thought of it, or that’s interesting—then maybe you’ve accomplished something.”
“There’s always a good feeling from finishing something you start,” he says, “but happiness? Remember that the founding documents say ‘The pursuit of happiness,’ not ‘happiness.’ There’s a difference.”