Last Chance

Catch it or Regret It

by Holly Otterbein

[ catch it or regret it ]

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Rika Hawes says she's moved by nostalgia, memory and childhood, but you wouldn't necessarily know it from walking into her installation, "The Room of Mirrors" (pictured). The problem isn't that her work is too opaque, it's simply too distracting. The installation — one of many pieces in the exhibit, created along with Kim Harty and Charlotte Potter — first takes you through a dark, skinny hallway littered with mirrors. After a series of wrong turns (you think something is a hallway when it's actually a mirror), you end up in another room.

This room is covered, top to bottom, with gold-painted carousel horses and more mirrors. There's also enough gold glitter on the floor to decorate 100 teenage girls' MySpace pages. The result is very fun, and a little frustrating: You accidentally run into several mirrors because you think they're open space, until you get so disoriented that you decide to poke, prod and examine everything first, just to make sure it's real.

So what did Hawes mean by all this, exactly? "I'm interested in nostalgia, and many adults are nostalgic for carousel rides at carnivals, because that sort of fun is very inaccessible to them," she says. "This distorted version of the carousels that I created here represents our memories. When you remember something, you're not accessing the same neurons — you're creating new ones. So you're literally piecing memories together, and they're not perfect."

All five artists in this exhibit purport to address the environment and wastefulness, but only Jason Austin + Aleksandr Mergold do so overtly. Using recycled plywood and vinyl siding, the two architects create a multicolored light sculpture, which, standing 10 feet tall and resembling the side of a boat, gets you thinking about reuse.

If you haven't been to this Piazza gallery, you should go, if only for the ping-pong table in the back. The art ain't too bad, either: Dr. Crab's painting Everyone Thinks I'm the Shit Bitch is more hideous than a Ralph Steadman piece, and just as hard to avert your eyes from. It shows a woman vomiting, pooping and doing all manner of other stomach-flipping things, in grotesque colors like mustard yellow and neon orange.

Can't make it? To see images from these exhibits, go to citypaper.net/agenda.