Artweek Review on "Urban Shelter"
2007
by Jakki Spicer
“Urban Shelter” Multi-Media Group Show at Limn Gallery
Limn Gallery is tucked behind a vast and labyrinthine (if labyrinths were composed of high-ceilinged, light-flooded chambers) furniture showroom tastefully stocked with $12,000 modernist settees. The gallery is hosting a group show exploring the “intertwine” between architecture and the environment, and focusing on “artists using the symbol of a house or shelter to express the fragility of survival, the lengths people go to create safe havens and their social and cultural implications.” The artists’ views make for an interesting juxtaposition to those of the furniture designers, whose creations carry such hefty price tags (the most expensive art piece is worth, if dollars are what we’re counting, about half of a mid-range couch). It prompts one to muse on the various ways we might think of the fragility of house and home, not to mention the social and cultural implications of “safe havens.”
Not surprisingly, the artists represented in the gallery find objects other than sleek teak sideboards to think through questions of home and shelter, of architecture and the environment. Huong Ngo and Rob Allen’s “Microtecture: The Lunar Years” features a wide scattering of tiny industrial-gray architectural models encapsuled in toy-machine eggs. The bottom halves of the eggs are vibrantly rainbow hued, giving the dull grey of the models (as well as the black sand they rest upon in the accompanying video) a heightened drabness—as if childhood imagination consisted in this contrast. The video—stop-action animation of the models fighting, swaying, and sitting still as the ground shifts around them—accentuates their lunar quality, and rhymes with the special effects of 1960s films. It is a slice of the nostalgia for a half-remembered future, and is set in melancholy contrast to the anxieties of the present in works by Caleb Duarte and John Watson.
Watson and Duarte both speak to questions of materials and their uses, misuses and disuses. Watson’s two pieces are constructed of found wood clumsily screwed and nailed and stapled together into structures that are something like what Frank Lloyd Wright might have built for a tree-house, had he had significantly lower production standards. They remind both of the quiet excitement of childhood discoveries of the natural world and the clumsy waste of cultural detritus.
Duarte uses drywall and cement bricks to construct works that speak to the instability of construction. “Floor Installation” is a precarious pile of these elements, with images sketched on its surfaces: a boy leaping; men with handcuffed wrists; a triumphant boxer, gloves raised; distressed and weeping women; a boy running toward the viewer, horror on his face. “Bloke (Break)” is a wall-mounted piece that is half drywall and wood, half cement, with an ugly crack running down the middle. Duarte’s structures expose the fragility of social and material stability in the built environment—the destruction at the heart of construction.
Emily Hall’s “Possible in August, See you Next to Pine Street” echoes this skepticism, if in a more whimsical way. Hers is a wall sculpture town: an awkward array of rudimentary facades constructed with balsa wood and overflowing with tissue paper flowers, balls of yarn, and ochre- and rust-colored bits of a lacy, spongy material. Another “house” is filled with oversized pastel ants, crickets, beetles and cockroaches.
Michelle Wasson’s large acrylic paintings are also ambivalent in their depiction of shelter; they are images colored with both anxiety and hope. “Earth House” and “Rizadu” depict futuristic houses swimming in glowing pastel landscapes. “Earth House” features a lemony-yellow sky and beige and purple tree shadows against a long, squat house covered in what could be large square windows or solar panels, a little windmill perched upon the roof. “Rizadu”’s rosy blue-yellow glowing sky is captivating, but the depth of the water it floats on is the most prominent feature of the painting. It is a dreamy, limpid blue, seemingly encompassing and supporting the entire scene, as if the earthy, curved house is adrift upon these waters of impossible depth—as if the water enclosed whole universes: there is an image like a distended globe in the water; one can almost make out the shape of Scandinavia or Italy or Florida.
Eric Medine’s two works are lonely and lovely pieces, eight foot square expanses of white drywall with laser-cut acrylic shapes slotted in, like underground shelters. One is named with the familiarity of habit: “The place where I always turn right;” the other with utter disorientation, like a description of Alice’s rabbit hole: “The place where up is down and right is left.” They are both peaceful in their clean expansiveness, and blankly anxious, like snowy Siberian steppes, if those landscapes were human creations.
These artists, their works tucked behind designer show rooms, uncover what such fashionable furniture both participates in and attempts to hide—the vast distance between the idea of a safe haven and its reality, and the lengths we’ll go to in attempting to make one the other.
-Jakki Spicer
Jakki Spicer is a freelance writer based in Alameda, CA.
“Urban Shelter” closed in September at Limn Gallery, San Francisco.
Limn Gallery is tucked behind a vast and labyrinthine (if labyrinths were composed of high-ceilinged, light-flooded chambers) furniture showroom tastefully stocked with $12,000 modernist settees. The gallery is hosting a group show exploring the “intertwine” between architecture and the environment, and focusing on “artists using the symbol of a house or shelter to express the fragility of survival, the lengths people go to create safe havens and their social and cultural implications.” The artists’ views make for an interesting juxtaposition to those of the furniture designers, whose creations carry such hefty price tags (the most expensive art piece is worth, if dollars are what we’re counting, about half of a mid-range couch). It prompts one to muse on the various ways we might think of the fragility of house and home, not to mention the social and cultural implications of “safe havens.”
Not surprisingly, the artists represented in the gallery find objects other than sleek teak sideboards to think through questions of home and shelter, of architecture and the environment. Huong Ngo and Rob Allen’s “Microtecture: The Lunar Years” features a wide scattering of tiny industrial-gray architectural models encapsuled in toy-machine eggs. The bottom halves of the eggs are vibrantly rainbow hued, giving the dull grey of the models (as well as the black sand they rest upon in the accompanying video) a heightened drabness—as if childhood imagination consisted in this contrast. The video—stop-action animation of the models fighting, swaying, and sitting still as the ground shifts around them—accentuates their lunar quality, and rhymes with the special effects of 1960s films. It is a slice of the nostalgia for a half-remembered future, and is set in melancholy contrast to the anxieties of the present in works by Caleb Duarte and John Watson.
Watson and Duarte both speak to questions of materials and their uses, misuses and disuses. Watson’s two pieces are constructed of found wood clumsily screwed and nailed and stapled together into structures that are something like what Frank Lloyd Wright might have built for a tree-house, had he had significantly lower production standards. They remind both of the quiet excitement of childhood discoveries of the natural world and the clumsy waste of cultural detritus.
Duarte uses drywall and cement bricks to construct works that speak to the instability of construction. “Floor Installation” is a precarious pile of these elements, with images sketched on its surfaces: a boy leaping; men with handcuffed wrists; a triumphant boxer, gloves raised; distressed and weeping women; a boy running toward the viewer, horror on his face. “Bloke (Break)” is a wall-mounted piece that is half drywall and wood, half cement, with an ugly crack running down the middle. Duarte’s structures expose the fragility of social and material stability in the built environment—the destruction at the heart of construction.
Emily Hall’s “Possible in August, See you Next to Pine Street” echoes this skepticism, if in a more whimsical way. Hers is a wall sculpture town: an awkward array of rudimentary facades constructed with balsa wood and overflowing with tissue paper flowers, balls of yarn, and ochre- and rust-colored bits of a lacy, spongy material. Another “house” is filled with oversized pastel ants, crickets, beetles and cockroaches.
Michelle Wasson’s large acrylic paintings are also ambivalent in their depiction of shelter; they are images colored with both anxiety and hope. “Earth House” and “Rizadu” depict futuristic houses swimming in glowing pastel landscapes. “Earth House” features a lemony-yellow sky and beige and purple tree shadows against a long, squat house covered in what could be large square windows or solar panels, a little windmill perched upon the roof. “Rizadu”’s rosy blue-yellow glowing sky is captivating, but the depth of the water it floats on is the most prominent feature of the painting. It is a dreamy, limpid blue, seemingly encompassing and supporting the entire scene, as if the earthy, curved house is adrift upon these waters of impossible depth—as if the water enclosed whole universes: there is an image like a distended globe in the water; one can almost make out the shape of Scandinavia or Italy or Florida.
Eric Medine’s two works are lonely and lovely pieces, eight foot square expanses of white drywall with laser-cut acrylic shapes slotted in, like underground shelters. One is named with the familiarity of habit: “The place where I always turn right;” the other with utter disorientation, like a description of Alice’s rabbit hole: “The place where up is down and right is left.” They are both peaceful in their clean expansiveness, and blankly anxious, like snowy Siberian steppes, if those landscapes were human creations.
These artists, their works tucked behind designer show rooms, uncover what such fashionable furniture both participates in and attempts to hide—the vast distance between the idea of a safe haven and its reality, and the lengths we’ll go to in attempting to make one the other.
-Jakki Spicer
Jakki Spicer is a freelance writer based in Alameda, CA.
“Urban Shelter” closed in September at Limn Gallery, San Francisco.
