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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Alison Knowles

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Alison Knowles, The Boat Book, 2014-15 Wood and metal frame with silkscreen, digital print on silk, collage, assemblage, personal ephemera, beans, books, fishing net, photographs, ship anchor, fabric tunnel, electrical lights, audio recording, etc., Courtesy the artist and James Fuentes Gallery, New York Photo: Bryan Conley, Carnegie Museum of Art

Alison Knowles, The Boat Book, 2014-15
Wood and metal frame with silkscreen, digital print on silk, collage, assemblage, personal ephemera, beans, books, fishing net, photographs, ship anchor, fabric tunnel, electrical lights, audio recording, etc.,
Courtesy the artist and James Fuentes Gallery, New York
Photo: Bryan Conley, Carnegie Museum of Art

 

Alison Knowles
Forum Gallery
Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh [link]
May 20-October 24, 2016

The Carnegie’s gallery is exactly as Dick Higgins described Knowles’s Big Book decades ago: as an “anthology,” an “accumulation” about situation and experience. Her survey, like this life-size, live-in publication and its ancestor, The Boat Book, cannot be described in any other way, except to borrow another of Higgins’s terms: intermedia. Objects spanning Knowles’s earliest Fluxus activities until now both excite and calm, puzzle and amaze, and ignite the senses. Sounds of beans shuffled by feet and the artist’s gentle voice float throughout, drawing in adults and children alike to experience excerpts of Knowles’s life, inseparable from her art.

Lauren Fulton
images courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Art and Lauren Fulton

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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

Russ Orlando

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russ orlando-cured 1

Russ Orlando
Cured  [2013]
Auto parts, salt, chain, meat hooks, metal, porcelain, slip, canvas, string, wire, school bell, pot, plexiglass
Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, PA [link]

The blue light emanating from Russ Orlando’s sculptural installation transforms the gallery from a sterile institutional environment to one filled with intrigue. As part of the Detroit artists in residency exhibition, Orlando’s work features auto parts hung on meat hooks in various stages of salt curing. Referencing sides of beef in a slaughterhouse meat locker, the sculptures’ salt crystallization patterns juxtaposed with the discarded auto parts are quite beautiful and unusual.  However, I question the artist’s conceptual metaphor of preservation as a means to heal—in this case the dying city of Detroit. I wonder, do we want to heal that which is dead or antiquated?

~ Colette Copeland

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