Fantastic Frameworks

Every now and then an exhibition has the power to elicit an intense and immediate visceral response. The work in “Fantastic Frameworks: Architectural Utopias and Designs for Life” hits the gut first and then meanders up to the cerebral cortex. This exhibition, curated by Lisa Baldissera at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria, fills three rooms with drawings, paintings, photographs, videos, sculptures and installations by local, national and international artists. The diverse individual works and their surprising relationships to each other provide a provocative awareness of how our bodies exist in physical space.

The everyday experience of private and public spaces is a prevalent theme in “Fantastic Frameworks.” As living bodies in the world, we often go through space mindlessly, moving from room to room, from street to street, without thinking about the connection our body is making with the physical spaces, tactile materials and social constructs that surround us. “Frameworks” stops us in our tracks, as real, conceptual and imaginative spaces forcefully reveal themselves throughout the exhibition.

Yayoi Kusama’s Life Repetitive Vision consists of fantastical, black and yellow, serpentine structures appearing to protrude from the floor. These detailed fabric constructions are covered with thousands of hand-painted dots of varying sizes—a dizzying sensation results as visual enticement intertwines with an uneasy sense of vertigo. This work is both dazzling and repellent in its intensity and transfixes us to the real and imagined space we occupy as we peer down into this herpetorium.

Andrea Zittel draws our attention to the way clothing responds to physical use—two wool dresses with rips and holes serve as collateral evidence for daily wear. This work is part of a larger project called “A-Z” where the artist seeks to construct the most pure and simple life possible. To this end, Zittel wore the same dress every day until it literally “wore out.” Her displayed dress forms become documents of a body’s existence in time and space.

In Claes Oldenburg’s London Knees, the focus is the physical space between “clothed” areas on the body. Oldenburg describes his interest as being the space that “lies between the hem of a woman’s skirt and the start of her boots.” The work, which is displayed in a long vitrine, moves from a particular place on the body (the knees) to a more general imagined space; it is a proposal for a large-scale installation on a riverbank in London—the fibreglass knees are accompanied by a carrying case and extensive documentation in the form of text and drawings. Oldenburg’s evocative sketches transport the viewer from the small-scale enclosed space of the suitcase to imagined giant knees in the expansive space of a landscape.

Another type of space that plays with perceptual scale is Greg Lynn’s Intricate Surface Butterfly Enclosure, where a narrow muslin tent forms a habitat for giant Blue Morpho butterflies from Costa Rica. The humidity of the entire room has been altered to accommodate the needs of these living creatures, so this installation subsumes a space much larger than its physical construction. As the delicate legs of these beautiful insects cling to the weave of the muslin fibres, attention is drawn to the very translucent and fragile membrane that barely separates us from the space of the “natural” world within.

Katrina Moorhead’s miniature swimming pools bring to mind the view of flying into Los Angeles and seeing the iconic image of the translucent blue shapes dotting the suburban landscape. Moorhead’s constructions are made with Styrofoam packing material (used to protect computer parts) and are lined with the tiniest, handmade, polymer clay tiles that glitter like jewels. The Styrofoam transcends its abject throwaway status as it seduces us into imaginings about desire, well-being and holiday package luxury.

Brenda Pelkey’s colour-saturated photographs of cocktail lounges, with their fake palm trees and Doric columns, showcase artificially themed spaces and the desires they attempt to fill. Our ability to suspend disbelief is a prerequisite for the survival of these interiors—without this these spaces would easily become pathetic and despondent environments lacking meaning or identity.

Group exhibitions can be intrinsically problematic because individual works can be overlooked or drastically recontextualized, or awkward anomalies can exist when artists are included for the prestige they carry. In “Fantastic Frameworks,” all the works exist as distinct and powerful individual entities, playing off one another in a subtle and open-ended manner. The resulting connections are neither didactic nor happenstance. Instead, this exhibition elucidates how art is part of the everyday and the everyday is part of art, the two inseparable, and, at times, indistinguishable. ■

“Fantastic Frameworks: Architectural Utopias and Designs for Life” was exhibited at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria from October 6 to December 3, 2006.

Wendy Welch is a visual artist based in Victoria. She is also Founder and Director of the Vancouver Island School of Art.