|
Before we learned to appreciate the comforts of home, there existed a sense of wildness, uncertainty and fear. It's implied in the concept of domestication. Those unruly instincts don't necessarily go away, in fact, they seep into the house and plague the physical architecture as much as the psychological construction of what we call home. Termites eat away at the foundation and raccoons sneak in throught he cat door, ravaging what's in the pantry. The waterproof seal breaks and unexpected things begin to occur.
Like everybody else in this country, you've probably been sticking around the house a bit more lately. Thoughts of safety and refuge float through the national consciousness as news of all manner of threat creeps in on NPR, via a piece of home electronics equipment snuggly tucked into that Ikea entertainment unit.
Much of the work in Housebroken attests to a porous domestic ondition. Artists, like everybody else, have often considered the duplicitous places we call home. Lately, the practice seems to carry more weight. In America, the state of being permeable has deeper resonance these days - it's no longer clear that the motion detector lighting on the porch can keep out intruders or define the boundaries between in and out.
Controlled containment is an elusive expectation often placed upon the house - think about all the quaint, gated communities, with guards or surveillance cameras posted at the entrance. Yoshi Abe's understated, slightly melancholic photographs depict moat-like infrastructures - the stark embankments, asphalt walkways and storm drains - that are ubiquitous entrapments of most housing developments. The stark concrete surfaces seem protective and unyielding, yet offer various points of entry. they're murky safety zones, especially at night, when everyone's supposedly tucked in bed. The lost soccerball and shriveled balloon, however, suggest narratives that aren't so reassuring.
Solidity is an illusion, always has been. What looks solid, can be hollow, like those faux wood grain doors that you can esily punch through with your bare hands. The profiles of recently available real estate in Rex Ray's shiny new collages have a similar empty space at their centers. By rendering the shapes of buildings in crisp white silhouettes, he points to a surprisingly handsome void in the structures upon which we project ideas of comfort. It's a particularly interesting prospect in the Bay Area, where the economic value of homes is inflated and erratic. Ray creates, by hand, patterns that suggest the foundation of brick, and emulate a gestural application of house paint. It's all shined and varnished under a weatherproof seal. The fact that Ray works both as a designer and an artist is evidence of some other kind of shifting foundation. Is the geometric patterned rug he's created suitable for gallery or living room?
Definitions that seem firm can be pliable. Canadian artist An Te Liu, who chips at conceptual bases with his training as an architect, gives quotidian elements new meaning through repetition. He uses ordinary kitchen sponges to reveal a contradictory nature. They are colorful, durable hard edge squares - geometric abstractions - that are also soft and absorbent. They're able to soak up liquid and dirt, yet there's a hint of a padded cell to their arrangement. They can muffle the screams. Something similarly strange happens with his wallpaper pattern made from endlessly repeated images of late-model tract homes. The house forms, which appear across the suburban landscape in very similar guises, becomes a mesmerizing meditative pattern that seems timeless and organic. The color scheme, it's worth noting, is inspired by the hues of the Dalai Lama's robes. The home, after all, is a temple.
There are those who believe the body is a temple too. The proverbial home in Larry Sultan's recent pictures is a site of constructed comforts, of cinematic sex. That is, porn films. San Fernando Valley abodes designed for middle class living now popularly serve as movie sets, as backdrops for a staged domestic activity, with actors and actresses going through narrative conceits and physical connections. While celebrities of a sort, they're working folks who live somewhere too. The videos they star in are usually consumed at home, in private. It's not such a stretch to apply the term hard core to a concrete foundation, yet it's doubtful that the recent vintage ranch homes, with their low-cost materials are as durable as they initially appear.
There's a direct link to the body in Kate Pocrass's performative project, "Stolen Soaps." It's a piece rooted in the bathroom, a zone reserved for intimate hygeine and physical secrets. The array of images depict toiletries that the artist has pilfered from the medicine chests, sinks and tubs of friends she's visited. It's a fairly harmless act, but one that reveals a precarious sense of trust that's applied to the intimate spaces we share. The artist gently shatters behavioral propriety as she peeks into those private places and nabs a souvenir that she then presents to the world, in a form resembling police evidence of a misdemeanor crime. It's a benign invasion (even if French milled products can be pricey) that reveals points of entry, potential holes in the wall.
There's an equally odd sense of borrowing or stealing to Jon Rubin's drawings, in which nostalgia for the perfect homes and gardens of times past - in this case the swinging 1970s - seem to mutate and sprawl out like unchecked ivy in the back yard. In these dense compositions, images have lifted from vintage interiors magazines in a shomewhat corporeal shade of red pencil. Floral drapery patterns merge into the design of a chintz couch, the rock wall of a fireplace and a wide array of designer wall coverings. The sheer amount of detail, the years of interioor and exterier fashions, meld into an unruly fantasia of design and domesticity.
Hopes and dreams invariably seep through domestic settings. Bruce Tomb's "Bedroom" functions like a functional model for this idea. The sculptural work merges a cold, angular minimalist form, a compact Donal Judd-inspired guest room that very comfortably can sleep two. Yet it's punctuated by an unruly fiberglass orb which bursts through the clean lines like a bubble of uncontainable thoughts, or good and bad dreams. The plastic cloud is actually transparent at its apex, offering a distorted view to the outside. It becomes a window and an eye that lets in the light, and offers a view to the world. Like Rex Ray, Tomb also has a hybrid pratice. He's a trained architect who runs a design firm, his artwork informed by that background.
castaneda/reiman, on the other hand, work primarily with materials employed by contractors, yet exclusively create art objects. Theirs is work of Home Depot abstractions, a subversion of prefabricated building materials. Skylights are a primary component of their recent pojects, and instead of letting in the sun, they provide a sense of delicate balance, a teetering base to constructions with strange poignancy. Their sculptures have formal qualities suggesting the pair pored over modern art history books and building supply catalogs with equal appreciation. Their work similarly combines references to utility and beauty, a combination that's oddly unsettling. The plumbing won't drain, a la Robert Gober, and in the painting department, their Ellsworth Kelly-ish patches of blue have plenty in common with Kelly-Moore. That's a familial relationship that lets a whole range of strange, exciting possibilities into the house.
-Glen Helfand
|
