House is Not a Home

Havana born artist, Jorge Pardo, recently had his first comprehensive exhibition in the United States at the Miami Center for Contemporary Art. His show, titled House, is a re-instillation of past works dating from his first solo exhibition in 1988 through 2007. Pardo’s past and present styles merge and are not categorized or recognized in the exhibit. Pardo combines mural sized photographs, ornately fashioned light fixtures, hand crafted furniture, geometric wall paintings, and everyday objects to create a unique interior space structured around the concept of a house.

Postcard for Workshop at Miami Center for Contemporary Art

Image: Jorge Pardo, Living Room, 2007

Pardo’s House is both familiar and oddly disconcerting. At the exhibit, viewers will be reminded of the interior space of a house; there is a living room, a kitchen, a dining room, a bedroom, a library, and a backyard complete with a swimming pool. The house lacks a bathroom, attic, or basement, but oddly has a café and a studio space. The vast open space of the rooms, the household items stripped of their usefulness, and the gallery setting, create an overall feeling of perplexity in House.

Floor plan of exhibit for Jorge Pardo: House

The different gallery spaces of the Miami museum have been opened up and connected for Pardo’s exhibit. The open floor plan, with rooms divided by partitions, allows visitors to meander through the various spaces. The rooms are large and loop into each other without obvious entrances and exits. This lack of a predetermined pathway creates the effect of disorganization and disorientation within the gallery.

Pardo’s House feels strange because it is so large. The rooms are sprawling and the ceilings high. Because the partitions do not enclose any space nor reach the ceiling, none of the rooms feel cozy. The sparsely decorated rooms are very open and create a feeling of vulnerability. The gallery has high ceilings and an emptiness, which makes Pardo’s House feel like a cold and sterile warehouse.

Another factor contributing to the unsettling feeling of Pardo’s House is the lack of privacy. In a normal house there is a hierarchy of space; some rooms are public space and others private. For example, living rooms or kitchens are public and designed to entertain company, while a bedroom is usually a private room. In Pardo’s House, all rooms are open and public; there are no intimate spaces allowed for privacy. The lack of privacy and vastness of space produces a sense of vulnerability.

Several of the rooms in Pardo’s House contribute to the idea of an all-inclusive exhibit, but don’t fit well into the concept of recreating a house. The café and studio are particularly out of place. The café is created from photos of the “Mountain Bar” in L.A.’s Chinatown which Pardo owns. It is separate from the house and fills a long hallway, which leads to nowhere. Red, plastic, spider-like light fixtures hang from the ceiling.

Mountain Bar -Wall Mural for Hallway

The studio area is created by a photo mural of both the interior and exterior of Pardo’s studio, a work bench with a computer, and some of Pardo’s early photographic work.

Jorge Pardo Studio -Wall Mural for Office

Untitled 2005 – Work Table and Computer in Office

These two spaces seem most incompatible with the exhibit because they are locations not usually associated with a home environment. The café and studio spaces remind us that we are not in a house but in a gallery transformed.

One concept Pardo revisits in each room is to question how the viewer reacts in gallery setting where familiar objects are arranged in a way to indicate rooms in a house. In House, Pardo has removed the functional and practical aspects of a real home; none of the rooms can actually be used for their regular purposes.

The most obvious way Pardo strips his rooms of their functionality is by completing them with photographic wall murals. In the kitchen the only real objects are a refrigerator, an inexpensively constructed island, and an espresso machine. The refrigerator works, or at least is plugged in, but there is uncertainty about working state of the espresso maker. The rest of the kitchen is completed by wall photographs of the sink, cabinets, and countertops. The wall murals suggests a kitchen, yet also draw attention to the fact we cannot use the cabinets or sink because they are only photographs. Like his kitchen, Pardo’s exhibit borders being art and being everyday.

Sea View Lane -Wall Mural for Kitchen

Pardo has a reputation for reconstructing everyday objects and making them impractical. The most obviously impractical items in House were Pardo’s beds and couch. The beds were suggested by large, yellow pieces of cardboard folded into the shapes of mattresses with polar fleece pillows thrown on them.

Wolfram 1997, Max jr. 1997 (left), Max 1997 (right) -Cardboard Bed Forms

Pardo’s couch is unusable as it is made solely of welded, copper pipes. Pardo’s furniture is art only after he removes its functional qualities, and Pardo does well. Museum guests have to carefully inspect Pardo’s objects to decipher whether they have been altered and whether they are an object d’art or an everyday item. All of Pardo’s objects are innovatively constructed and have a modern aesthetic.

Le Corbusier Sofa 1990 – Couch in Living Room

The gallery setting for Pardo’s exhibition also adds confusion to his work. Pardo’s earlier exhibitions have taken place in less traditional settings such as, peoples’ homes and garages, which further blurs the line between art and commonplace. Bedroom furniture is familiar when in a home, yet made strange when arranged in a gallery setting. “Do not touch” signs prohibit the viewers from feeling at home in House, as do the overly attentive museum guards.

Visitors have the option of taking a brochure listing the dates and titles of Pardo’s work, but no titles are displayed in the gallery. The lack of labels in the gallery makes the exhibit feel more like a house than an exhibit, but also poses questions. Which items are art? What is this artwork about?

Pardo’s exhibit is successful; it forces viewers to question their relationship to his work. Pardo’s House is certainly not a comfortable, cozy house or a house at all, yet it suggests rooms in a home. Like most real homes, House has furniture, walls, rooms, and even decorations on the walls, yet House bewilders viewers by denying some of the realities of a house. Aficionados are not sure if they are seeing art or seeing a modern and artistic home, which is disconcerting. When seeing Pardo’s work, one is not entirely convinced that they are experiencing art or the everyday, but something in between. Visiting Pardo’s House is an inclusive, aesthetic experience, and branches many areas of art and design, while its overall effect is oddly perplexing. House is not a home, but an interesting, thought provoking, and well-rounded art experience.

Review: Charles Burwell "Paintings and Works on Paper"

Charles Burwell, an African-American painter in his mid-fifties, paints in the style of geometric abstraction. His recent show at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, on display from September 14th to October 28th , 2007, consisted of five oil paintings and five prints.

Burwell’s paintings are large and colorful, while his prints are small, black and white, and intricate. By layering psychedelic color combinations, Burwell’s paintings are elaborate and visually intense. By contrast, his digital art is constructed of black and white designs; their intensity comes from their detail and contrast of value. Both Burwell’s paintings and prints reference organic shapes and contain vertical striping. Vertical striping and energetic shapes are Burwell’s signature.

Burwell’s digital art is black and white and doesn’t command the gallery space his large colorful canvases do. They were created in a virtual way but take up real space, as do his paintings. Although the digital art images are intricate and intimate, they lack variation of surface and the hand-painted quality which makes his paintings so extraordinary. Burwell’s digital work is elaborately patterned, yet sterile.

In contrast, Burwell’s paintings are lively. Most of his paintings displayed at the DCCA are untitled, reference cartoon shapes, and seem spontaneous in creation but methodical in process. Looking at Burwell’s paintings, one can clearly see his process and discern in what order his shapes and layers were painted. There is little attempt to disguise the hand-painted quality, despite the crisp edges of Burwell’s shapes. Because Burwell’s painted surfaces are so richly and intensely patterned with same valued colors, there is little visual depth in his work; the colors jump to the surface.

His use of patterning is more successful in some of his paintings than it is in others. The paintings that have an all-over unified pattern are overwhelming to look at, as there is no place for the eye to rest or linger. These works are often highly detailed, patterned, and intense. When looking at one of Burwell’s works containing a unified pattern, there is not much to discover; the work is quickly understood, and it is easy to pass by.

His most successful paintings are those which have moments of intensity and moments of calm. The variety of shape, color, and patterning in these paintings are the elements that hold one’s attention. His paintings that have a more varied surface and convoluted layering system is more engaging and allows the viewer to become absorbed in the nuances of his work.

Like many geometric abstract paintings, it is difficult to describe Burwell’s work without focusing on formal, and oftentimes boring, issues. By describing Burwell’s work, the visual energy of his paintings is not relayed but lost in the language of color, shape, and pattern. Perhaps Burwell’s paintings are purely decorative in their abstraction, purity of color and shape, perhaps his art is created with the sole purpose of manipulating the formal elements of painting.

Like all paintings, Charles Burwell’s structure an experience; the experience he creates is ambiguous. If the goal of Burwell’s work is to evoke memory through sensory experience, it might appeal to people who lived during the psychedelic art period of the 1960’s. The colors Burwell chooses and the intensity of surface might suggest the psychedelic art era, but not the shapes and forms; these are truly Burwell’s.

His work is impersonal, as it doesn’t directly reference any recognizable imagery. This makes his paintings hard to relate to or interpret. On the other hand, his paintings lend themselves to the pleasure of looking without being about something, and thus have universality. There is no right or wrong interpretation of Burwell’s paintings and since they are abstract they can be enjoyed equally by all despite social or political views.

These positive aspects of Burwell’s work can be appropriately attributed to any painting of pure abstraction and thus negates them as qualities that create a unique viewing experience. What makes the experience of viewing Burwell’s work differently from any other abstract geometric panting?

Burwell’s paintings do not reference or depict a particular experience, but instead create one. His paintings are bright and cheerful, and their intense orange and hot pink colors coupled with equally valued cool colors create an optical vibration. One can be amazed by Burwell’s intricately woven layers of color and stripes of paint. His paintings are joyful and energetic, and his lines are crisp, bouncy, and bold. Burwell has developed his own vocabulary of shapes that reappear in many of his works. The mark of the artist’s hand is what makes these paintings special. The formal decisions Burwell makes coupled with the energetic shapes he developed, are the elements that separate his paintings from other paintings in his field.


Charles Burwell’s work can be seen at the Bridgett Mayer Gallery or on line at: http://www.mayerartconsultants.com/artist_burwellhome.htm

Memorials for the Living

Visiting artist at the Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, Matthew Dehaemers has structured a collaboration with the Caregiver Support Group from the Delaware chapter of Alzheimer’s Association. Dehaemers’s community based art project was sponsored by National Endowment for the Arts, the Puffin Foundation, AstraZeneca, and the JPMorgan Chase Foundation. Dehaemers is not new to community work; he has experience working for community based grant projects in Wisconsin and Kansas to create murals for schools and historical landmarks.

For this project, Dehaemers worked with four families who have spouses, parents, or grandparents with Alzheimer’s disease. In a collaboration they created three works: a conceptual video, an interactive maze, and an installation of altered cabinets and boxes. All three works concern the caregivers’ memory of their loved ones in auditory, visual and tactile ways.

The first work, a video, titled Will You Hear My Voice, depicts a composite image of both caregiver and patient. On the left side of the screen, half the caregiver’s face told stories of their ill family member before they became inflicted with the disease. Simultaneously half the Alzheimer’s patient’s face complets the screen, mute and disengaged. The video alternates seamlessly between the four sets of patients and their caregivers and their individual stories in Will You Hear My Voice. The patients’ caregivers become their sole voice and advocate. As the Alzheimer’s patients lose their ability to communicate verbally, they become defined by what their caregivers remember about them.

The mind labyrinth, titled Will You Trace My Steps, a floor piece constructed by Dehaemers addresses memory loss. It consists of interlocking foam puzzle squares in vibrant colors laid out on the floor in the shape of a large brain. The colors of the foam puzzle squares correlate with a PET scan of an Alzheimer’s patient’s brain. A winding maze is drawn on the foam tiles with indelible marker and contains writings derived from the caregiver’s experiences. Viewers are permitted to walk on the brain, without shoes, and trace the caregivers’ written memories of their loved one. By walking on a path that becomes gradually more convoluted, and reading sentences that become increasingly challenging to decipher, viewers follow the footsteps of a person with Alzheimer’s.

The third, and most moving, component to this show, titled Will You Read My Mind, consists of several altered cabinets and cigar boxes in which the caregivers reference the patients’ lives through placement of meaningful objects. The most heart wrenching objects contained in the cabinets are those that reference the loss of mobility and independence. Items, such as the patents’ car keys, eye glasses, and drivers’ licenses were isolated and made into relics for this project, showing the patients’ dependency. The cabinets and cigar boxes were arranged to allow visitors to carefully look through the personal items of the Alzheimer’s patients. Touching the objects owned by the patients brought viewers close to the reality of their life.

The altered cabinets were the most memorable and powerful works in the show, despite their creators’ lack of aesthetic training. Will You Read My Mind has the presence of true outsider art as if it could appear in Baltimore’s American Visionary Art Museum. Although the caregivers were guided through this project by Dehaemers, there was a true sense of self-taught artists in this work. The emotional impact of the altered cabinets is carried through to the viewer because of their reality and their tactility. It is saddening to imagine the Alzheimer’s patients’ rich lives reduced to a cabinet or container for others to look through.

The care in which Will You Read My Mind is executed and laid out reveals the importance and meaningfulness this project held for the caregivers. These memory cabinets don’t hold the Alzheimer’s patients’ memories, but the caregivers’ memories of the patient. The construction process, guided by Dehaemers, appeared to be a very cathartic exercise for the caregivers of letting go or a coming to terms with the loss of a family member’s ability to take care of or express him or herself.

Although there was excitement and joy in the exhibition, attending the reception was more like a funeral. The caregivers were very proud to show off their creations, and the viewers were eager to look through the cabinets, yet the underlying message of regression and memory loss were constant reminders of death close at hand. The cabinets were like memorials or roadside shrines not for dead people, but for people still living.

Dehaemers’s show evoked the nearness of death for these four Alzheimer’s patients and the difficulties the elderly face when approaching the end of their lives. It instills the fears of one’s own family growing old, losing memory, losing their ability to speak, and the inevitability of their death.

This body of artwork, which is community and craft based is sentimental in a way that maked all the other ‘fine’ art in the gallery seem sterile and ineffective. The cabinets, which most lacked aesthetic refinement, and were conceptually obvious, were the most poignant of all.

This show will be on display at the DCCA from September 15^th until October 3^rd.

To see photographs of this exhibit or to read another review, paste the following URL into your browser:

http://www.delawareonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070925/HEALTH/709250393/1113/SPORTS03