Home Is Where the Art Is

Ironic reflections on a familiar theme at the Art Alliance.

Laura Hutton's Rug, (1998), fabric, thread and rubber backing.

by Robin Rice

Domestic Spaces

Philadelphia Art Alliance, 251 S. 18th St., through May 9, 215-545-4302

Domesticity has become a popular theme for art exhibitions. When I learned that Art Alliance juror Charlotta Kotik had chosen it, I initially wondered, "Why couldn't she come up with something more original?" But, after seeing the show, which is full of high-quality work, most of it new to me, and meditating on related shows that I've seen and read about, I came to the conclusion that domesticity is a conundrum for our time. It permeates prime-time television in ever more quirky forms: aliens living in a converted attic; a gay man sharing a flat with a heterosexual woman; and a plastic surgeon who decides to move back home with Dad. Clearly, today's American "family" is open to more possibilities than the wink, wink/nudge, nudge comedy of Three's Company.

Many of us, fictional and real, are trying to re-envision domestic tranquility. From Seinfeld's encyclopaedic collection of cereal brands to Frasier's grudging acceptance of his father's La-Z-Boy to Oprah's dictum that everyone needs a personal meditation space complete with scented candles, we can't live without household arrangements. But we're awfully self-conscious today. We want to do it uniquely yet traditionally and… just right.

Kotik's choices are strong but not always obviously relevant to her topic. As is often the case with the Art Alliance's group shows, Domestic Spaces feels like a little too much show for its converted domestic space. Thirty-three artists are a lot, and less quirky galleries might accommodate them more comfortably.

Chris Larson's installation Social Contract is the perfect opening to the show. It establishes some themes that are explored by other works and some which are not. On an AstroTurf-type rug, a fence of interwoven branches encircles a shedlike house with a video monitor in its window. When I saw this piece in a different form in a show curated by Gerard Brown, the ring of branches struck me as defensive. In the Art Alliance's claustrophobic sitting room with its marble fireplace, the kindling seems almost laid for a bonfire, with the archetypal "home" serving as a Joan of Arc-style martyr at the center. The bare limbs, in any case, are references to nature.

The motif is expanded in video. Leafy branches flash against the sky as if seen from a moving automobile. The audio element combines a rather self-conscious voice reading from Rousseau's Social Contract, in tones that lack fervor, and ambient sounds of burbling water and bucolic birdcalls. Rousseau's idea, for those who have forgotten, is that humans are naturally good but are corrupted by property. Larson's work reminds us that nature has become property, and property is essential to our vision of life.

Upstairs, Laura Hutton's big painting Rug is a coolly ambiguous representation of an empty bedroom reflected in a mirror. It reflects nicely on Catherine Lumenello's white-on-white Home Sweet Home installation, which includes a full-size bed with a picket fence headboard, a cross-stitched sampler ("Home Sweet Home") and a rag rug in the silhouette of a (probably female) figure. A sign on the bed lettered in black, "PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH," is perhaps necessary but adds an obtrusive layer of meaning.

More white bedding: Jeffrey Mongrain's pristine Memoria: Pillows is one of several pieces that would benefit from more space. It evokes a full-size bed, but minimally, through a pair of unglazed white ceramic pillows that extend from the wall at the appropriate height. Each bears the imprint of a head, but the bottom of each is rounded—as if suspended rather than resting on a bed.

There are, of course, houses. Benjamin Schulman is showing two ceramic works. House, about the size of a large dollhouse or small doghouse, has an iconic peaked form but no roof. The exposed interior structure is built up of white flat china elements. The facade is green. Pile (the word is sometimes a synonym for a large building) seems to be one of a pair with House. It's a pile of debris containing boxy chunks of grid-based ceramic. The blasting of the fragile ceramic material is provocative, but one notices that the two houses (assuming Pile was a house) were not constructed in the same way.

Shannon Bowser's little white house, suspended between crude tripods of wire, is especially striking when the galleries are empty. The little black switch of fabric silently rotating beneath the house like a supernatural tornado has a sinister kinetic energy. Robert Winokur's ceramic A House Divided has a dark angular silhouette. Its metallic salt-glazed surface has a wonderful, almost crystalline texture. The building is divided into two parts that seem strong though interdependent, rather than about to "perish" as the title hints. Broomstick Perch is Andrea Zemel's installation in the form of a cage (another type of house) with bright rag and feather "bars." A perch consisting of a broom suspended on heavy chains suggests that the "bird" that lives here is a witch.

There are surprisingly few representations of people. Kass Mencher's informal photographs of a Family in Minnesota (praying hands relief above an American flag calendar, an older woman and an older man loading film in a camera) and Friends in Philadelphia (original art on the walls, bare feet and a bare beer belly) are probably the most personal works in the show. Valetta's diptych of pink women in and outside an interior with hotter pink curtains is a far cry from Nicholas Fox's untitled aqua box containing a row of white plaster fingers.

There's a furniture theme. Diane Burko's and Richard Ryan's Wissahickon Screen combines Burko's paintings of nature with furniture. Robert Dodge is showing abstracted furniture in which art has triumphed over function. A meticulous transfiguration of the mundane characterizes Kevin Kautenburger's pair of chairlike objects of cherry wood covered with aluminum screen and bronze screen. These hang upside-down, Shaker fashion. Burnell Yow's wall-mounted Roadkill #1 Deer is a "found chair" constructed of wooden dowels and canvas straps. It's a ready-made (or ready-unmade) with the quality of a fragmented theorem, which Yow displays to good advantage.

James Andrew Gilmore's and Nicholas Kripal's cast concrete vessel forms are so unlike. Gilmore shows us the inside of a positive shape in N. 4th St., while Kripal really wants us to consider the negative of his vaguely organic Basins.

In the end, the eclectic selection is infinitely more impersonal and ironic than cozy. All we know for sure is that it's close to home.