Curated by Peter Clough
Jon Huron
May 1 - May 10, 2015
127 Central Ave. Apt. 3, Brooklyn NY
127 Central Ave. Apt. 3, Brooklyn NY
In any building – house, office, public building, summer cottage – people need a
gradient of settings, which have different degrees of intimacy. A bedroom or boudoir
is most intimate; a back sitting room or study less so; a common area or kitchen
more public still; a front porch or entrance room most public of all. When there is a
gradient of this kind, people can give each encounter different shades of meaning,
by choosing its position on the gradient very carefully.
– Christopher Alexander, Sara Ishikawa, Murray Silverstein, Max Jacobson,
Ingrid Fiksdahl-King, and Shlomo Angel, from A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings,
Construction, 1977
Peter Clough, Jennifer Gustavson, Jon Huron and Amy Giovanna Rinaldi are pleased to announce Bedroom Show, a four person exhibition of site-specific installations in our bedrooms. Each work takes our own pre-existing bedroom as both its raw material and condition for display, with all of its furniture, personal objects, and debris of daily life. We then add to, subtract from, reorganize and transform these spaces through our various ongoing practices – sculpture, painting, video, performance – to create new installations that must exist simultaneously as functional sites for our lived daily routines and as independent artworks that bear the full conceptual and aesthetic burden of that discourse.
As pre-existing spaces, our bedrooms are created and recreated through the unfolding of our lives, a process of formation that began long before we were conscious, albeit in different physical rooms. Objects accumulate through gradual acquisition. They are organized intentionally to serve a variety of functions – sleep, sex, privacy, work, entertainment, storage. Coincidence and habit create unintentional formations – the messy desk, or clothes-strewn floor. The things on the wall are organized aesthetically; the things in the closet are not. And we create our bedrooms psychologically, by the meanings we bring to them and the ways we inhabit them, the extreme intimacy we project onto them as havens for retreat from outside life.
But bedrooms are not created conceptually, through the pre-determined logic of intentionality, as artworks are. And by using these spaces as both site and subject matter for installation, we are attempting to thwart our own capacity for predetermination. Clough constructs a room-sized climbing structure that occupies the full negative space of his bedroom, activating it with electronic amplification, video and performance. In the month leading up to the show, Gustavson executes a series of private performances in her bedroom related to bodily function, and displays their remnants alongside sculptures and personal objects. Huron transforms his bedroom into a theatrical set for his own Stalinist tomb. And Rinaldi uses sculptural abstractions in response to embodied and disembodied modes of occupying space.
In Bedroom Show, art inhabits life and private becomes public. The divide between the intentional and the unintentional blurs, and what was once visible only as the remnants of lived experience is rendered visible as content. Likewise, the various arts we practice actively over time are framed as the accumulation of lived experience, rather than discrete acts of intentionality. In this dual transformation, our work and our life bend around each other – intimate gestures in intimate spaces.
Peter Clough
Jennifer Gustavson
Jon Huron
Amy Giovanna Rinaldi
