<<
{click on image to view more}
Download
Exhibition Brochure (PDF) Domestic Disturbance
August 25–November 4, 2001
Salina Art Center, Salina, Kansas
Curated by John Salvest
"The familiar is not necessarily the known." –Hegel
The house in which I grew up was a two-story colonial style residence
built by my parents. Our family lived in it from December 1962 through
December 1994. I carry that house around with me at all times. I
can vividly recall all its details—wallpaper and upholstery
patterns, tile and carpet colors, the smell of the hamper and the
sound of the front gate closing. An inventory of furniture, appliances,
curtains, pillows, mirrors, rugs, lamps, clocks, televisions, radios,
houseplants and knickknacks specific to that house still exists
in a climate-controlled storage compartment in my mind.
I stopped living there on a regular basis when I married and took
my first real job. That was some ten years before my parents finally
moved away. But I have never really stopped living there, even now.
It haunts me like a sometimes cruel and sometimes benevolent ghost.
No matter what house I have lived in or will ever live in, its sights,
sounds and smells will always be overlaid upon that structure. Its
foundation, leaky basement and all, is the foundation for all houses
that follow. Every staircase I climb is its staircase. Every ringing
doorbell I answer is its doorbell. Every yard I mow is its tiny
postage stamp of a yard. Everywhere I sleep, I am still sleeping
there.
385 Chestnut Street was the stage set for an unfolding drama of
more than thirty years. In various combinations depending on college,
jobs and marriage, five people (and, for a while, a dog) shared
its rooms. It was the setting for my own coming of age and for the
dynamic psychological interplay between personalities. Mother, father,
sister, brother. Any relationship I have had or will have with another
human being is an extension of those relationships. I cannot separate
who I am from that house and its inhabitants. With little mental
effort, my eyes glaze over and I am transported back to its kitchen,
dining room, basement or bedrooms. Convince me that I am not now
sitting in the living room watching light reflect off cut glass
on the mantel of the never-used fireplace. With each room I can
easily envision a hundred happy and sad episodes, moments of high
drama and daily routine from a story that is, like your own, more
complex and mysterious than any work of fiction could ever hope
to be.
These daydreams have a surreal quality. Events do not necessarily
follow in chronological or even logical order. Years overlap; seasons
intermingle. In this ghost of a house I too move like a spirit.
In it I travel from second floor to basement in an instant, foregoing
temporal and spatial laws. In it I have x-ray vision as well. Closet
doors and cabinet covers suddenly turn transparent, revealing their
neatly arranged contents. The images in my brain are lifelike yet
slightly distorted. In my mental photograph of a room, one particular
piece of furniture may, inexplicably, loom large and dominate its
space unnaturally. Appliances and furniture mutate like Alan Topolski's
Houseware. As with Greely Myatt's Rug, a fragment of memory is all
that is necessary; objects complete themselves. Instead of the advancing
and receding cricket song in Amy Jenkins' Almost Home, the soundtrack
for my imaginings is the back-and-forth roar of a vacuum cleaner.
Like a fur-lined teacup, what appears in my mind's eye is at once
both familiar and strange.
Despite the strangeness of these domestic daydreams, it is a relief
to leave today's troubles behind and a comfort to know that what
is past is not completely lost. But my reveries are not entirely
blissful. A tension exists between nostalgic longing and a creeping
uneasiness. A feeling as vivid as a flatiron with upholstery tacks
tells me that my visit has been long enough and I am ready to return
to the present. After all, was not the groundwork for all future
woe as well as joy laid in those times?
In composing Domestic Disturbance, I was looking for artists whose
work seemed to possess the same conflicting qualities as my domestic
daydreams – ordinary and unusual, comforting and unsettling,
rational and irrational, humorous and sad. I suppose that I was
casting about for work that felt like the memories of home I carry
around inside me—familiar enough to comfort yet strange enough
to disturb.
Throughout my search, I used Man Ray's famous sculpture Cadeau (Gift)
as my guide. With one physically simple but psychologically complex
gesture, he transformed a common household object into a seductive
yet menacing icon that precisely reflects the oftentimes contradictory
nature of domestic life.
Like that wonderfully evocative work, the objects, installations
and videos in this exhibition all explore a zone of tension between
the familiar and the unexpected. Frequently that tension finds release
in humor. Nervous laughter results when a slightly overweight viewer
realizes that Brian Wasson's Scale does more than supply raw data.
With playful ruthlessness, it immediately calculates for its victim
his or her ideal height based on weight. For those unhinged by a
hair in their soup or on their soap, it is hard not to laugh and
cringe simultaneously at the nightmarish grout on a section of bathroom
wall in Barbara Kendrick's Caught.
You may notice the lack of physical human presence in Domestic Disturbance.
Except for a woman nervously (and silently) partaking of a midnight
snack in Dawn DeDeaux's Woman Eating Porkchop and a few unspeaking
residents of Nic Nicosia's Middletown, there are no people among
these domestic props and settings. Andy Yoder's table is set, but
there are no guests. Ernesto Pujol's Crib is childless. No one wears
Les Christensen's silverware wings or her oversized wedding dress
made of broken dishes. The only witness to the unusual events in
Gerald Guthrie's tiny room is a giant human eye—your eye.
You, the viewer, are the human presence, free to inhabit these odd
spaces and examine these strange artifacts that are at once, somehow,
both comforting and disturbing.
<< |