 |
|
The Exhibition "Humble House" is a totalizing environment. Created by four artists,
Lissa Wilson-Aguilar, Kristen Rhea van Liew, Billy Tran and Jen Zakrzewski, the
installation showcases works that are immersive in nature and seek not only to activate
the viewer's consciousness of their own bodies, but in several cases directly involve the
viewer's physical presence as an agent in the work. The artists have worked collaboratively
and created an environment where each body of work transitions into the next, seeking to create
a unified and unsettling experience for the viewer that is alternately visually and physically
engaging. Narrow passages, video and flimsy walls reinforce daily phobias and anxieties such
as social interaction, isolation and uncertainty about the future.
Billy Tran uses video as a medium to disrupt received notions of our relationship both to
space and to image. In Tran's formulations, the two are deeply interconnected, and in his
installation films of the exhibition space, in its unaltered form are populated with a crowd
of spectators who through the act of being filmed and re-presented become subjects. This image
of the crowd mirrors the viewer and his/her interaction with the crowd as its image slowly
dissolves isolating the viewer as a new subject, the new "public" in a transformed space.Lissa Wilson-Aguilar's contribution speaks to the emergence of sexual roles and their defining role in gendered behaviors. In a quite disturbing tableaux-like environment, a figure of a pre-adolescent girl, rendered in a grotesque fashion suggesting the "formless" attitudes associated with childhood, is facing into a corner. Drawn across the walls that she is turned away from are colorful representations of adult female forms engaged in auto-erotic postures. Cornered, the figure is shamed for being the plausible culprit of the drawings, putting the viewer's empathy or lack there of for the figure in the role of questioning the source as well as interpreting the effect these images will have on the "lifeless" body of this problematized representation of childhood. Kristen Rhea van Liew's interests in use of space as well as post-modern dance and performance have been combined as a component of the "Humble House". Two members of her newly formed dance company, PED, will be performing in a compulsively-coated room of cotton balls. This insulated environment provides the ideal space for the dancers who will be rendered deaf and blind to the activity around them as they explore themes that are relative to the exhibition through a technique known as Authentic Movement. This novel performance environment requires the viewers to perform similarly as they move from entrance to exit, blind to the context of the dancer's subjective experiences of the space. Jen Zakrzewski's installation will aggressively assert itself upon the viewer, demanding that the viewer physically alter his/her trajectory as a traditional white-cube spectator. Using tactics deployed in performance environments, theatre and burlesque, a destabilizing space, which evokes a fun-house environment gone awry, requires the viewers to navigate a web-like interior before finally exiting the "Humble House". This final blow to the spectator-turned performer will clearly state that what all four artists are thinking about is not only the phenomenological implications of space and architecture, but also the ethical and political implications as well. |