EUTOPIA

Dennis Maher

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Photo: Tom Little, courtesy of The Mattress Factory

Photo: Tom Little, courtesy of The Mattress Factory

Dennis Maher
A Second Home [2016]
architectural salvage, construction materials, antique furnishings, toys, architectural models, video projections, audio
The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh [link]

Maher’s immersive installation transports the viewer into a miniature, magical world of curious inventions and constructions. Utilizing current trends in architecture and design, repurposing and salvaging are key strategies of the project. However, Maher’s work goes beyond reuse. By embedding objects from the Mattress Factory’s original inhabitants and building a parallel, kinetic world inside the historic site, the three-story evolving structure poses questions about the role between history, site and object. Rather than creating architecture with specific form and function, the artist challenges the viewer to conform his/her body and viewing perspective to adapt to Maher’s “Second Home”—one that is disorienting, but miraculous to behold.

~ Colette Copeland
 images courtesy of the author, photo credit: Colette Copeland
images courtesy of The Mattress Factory, photo credit: Tom Little

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Darren Lee Miller

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DarrenLeeMiller-pansy

Darren Lee Miller “Pansy” _courtesy of the artist and Revision Space

Darren Lee Miller
SIT STILL: photography, portraits, and doubling
Curated by Nicole Coffineau [link]
Revision Space [link]
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Expressing a primordial innocence of arousal, Miller shifts exteriors internally to provide a surreal, subconscious glimpse into longing, acceptance, and power. With “childhood” propped as simultaneous voyeur and youthful naiveté, the physical players similarly mirror the interchangeable role of giver/receiver. In so doing the work illustrates the power of willingness, irretrievably tangled and consummately fulfilled by the identifier. While the title is a short game pun, “Pansy” deeply proposes questions about one’s understanding of self and how desire is nurtured.

~ Ian F. Thomas

image courtesy of the artist and Revision Space

Ian F. Thomas

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ianthomas-yesterdaystomorrow

Ian F. Thomas
Yesterday’s Tomorrow [2013]
ceramic, acrylic, coal, audio device, hired laborer

Yesterday’s Tomorrow presents an absurdist micro-portrait of Pennsylvania’s socio-environmental dilemma. A paid laborer, for unspecified reasons, rubs coal onto a ceramic hillock for six hours, lulled into numb complacency with generic beer and canary chirping on a digitized loop. The monotonous task completion outweighs need for cognition. This passive apathy infiltrates the gallery as patrons grow bored and increasingly alienated while the mound is gradually destroyed. The work’s clear metaphors spark both environmental/moral disgust and personal empathy, yet more contextually interesting is the painfully prolonged labor of cultural production, which was industriously ignored after an initial viewing.

~ Ryder Richards
images courtesy of the artist

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