artworks
Rooms to Let II 468 West Town St Columbus Ohio
Melissa Vogley Woods north facing window
window/window dialogue 2011
Window/window dialogue was created by stretching red ripstop fabric strips across the space occupied by window of adjacent houses. The space is representation of a gaze between places. From this ephemeral structure of a place to a place, the red creates a space. This space is open underneath and can be stood in. Like an eavesdropper, the viewer can be inclosed by the windows space blocking and shifting the form with their presences. The connection and created space seem to pull the windows together while blocking out all else in this created structure.
As wind and common sounds of the neighborhood blow by the ribbons quiver slightly.
MJ Bole 2nd floor bathroom
Toilet Worship & Concealment 2011
rooms to let installation
I have been making a visually oriented artists book "Toilet Worship", a visual book that in 80 pages celebrates toilet/scatological related research and the obscure adjacent. For my instillation I thought of utilizing the misprints from making the book as wallpaper in the bathroom. In order to have more wall space for the misprints, and because the existing tub was an ugly "call Bathfitter" model I walled off the tub. Because the tub would be concealed ( you can see the outside of the tub below the constructed wall) I made the tub into a small bathroom with a toilet and a tiny mounted sink in a yellowish light . You see this through the fish eye lens peep. The second peep is an old waste pipe from a tub that I altered. This is chained to the inside of the wall so you can only pull the plug out only so far to see the concealed bathroom within the tub. I rented a sexy deco pink toilet and TP holder for the toilet within the bathroom, highlighting the voluptuous quality of so many fixtures.
Melissa Vogley Woods 1st 2nd floor bedroom
Gutted 2011
In this work, I was interested in working with the wall of the house, carving and chiseling out layers of fictive
rooms-scapes some tracings are meant to be old and some new. The tracing plays with personally constructed structures and physical structure and an intermingling of the two wondering what is sound and unsound.
Existing paint, plaster, stickers, lath, and sheetrock are the materials of this work. The chiseling echos the gutting of a house as it is primed for rehabbing.
Ash Kyrie kitchen
The Ziggurat and Abraham 2011
Made over three thousand years ago, the massive Ziggaurat of Ur is a holy site to three of the worlds major religions. The birthplace of Abraham who sired both Isaac and Ishmael. These three men purportedly sparked Judaism, Christianity, and Islam(listed in order of origin.)The actual site in 2003 served as a tourist destination to the military personnel station at Tallil air force base. Situated south of An Nasariya
Confined to viewing the kitchen through a hole in a thick wool blanket, to the right of the viewer is a 16 foot image of the Ziggaraut of Ur adhered to billboard arch spanning from the walls. The site is restricted from your physical presence because it of it's importance. American soldiers intermingle at the base of the Ziggaraut buying souvenirs and drinking water. The soldiers must take boxes of water wherever they go. These bottles litter both the real site and the kitchen on Martin Avenue.
Matt Flagle first floor living room
False Hearth 2011
Matthew Flegle's site-responsive work False Hearth is situated on the first floor of a house in Columbus, OH. It is at first sight a pitch-black parlor with a sleek, graphite-dusted mantel. On the floor a few feet away is a white plaster casting of a truncated tree limb, as if it were a misplaced chunk of kindling. Viewers are inclined to piece together a narrative with these sparse elements, but the picture would be incomplete. The dark room is a front, a bit of scenic construction, only the first level of a larger space. As one's eyes adjust to the low light a breach can be discerned: the dead space of the fireplace is in fact a passageway that can be crawled through on all fours. On the other side, past a couple of cosmetic walls, viewers will emerge within the original room. Its dimensions are larger, but the space is crowded and reduced by the imposition of the room-within-the-room. As viewers move past an actual fireplace they round a corner and encounter a subtle camera obscura that projects an image of a tree from the front lawn. This tree is an inverted version of itself cast against the backside of a false wall.
Much of Flegle's work demands a direct, corporeal interaction in order to establish links between materials, architectural space and psychological occurrences. The full yet ethereal tree in the camera obscura is loosely associated with the concrete physicality of the plaster limb in the first room. The reality of one place is upended by the realization of another, and the sense of inside and outside, actual and illusory, is conflated through both image and constructed zones of inhabitation.
Undine Brod
1st 2nd floor bedroom closet
Scrim Incomplete
(site-specific closet installation)found and collected furniture, objects, and used clothing from thrift stores and trash bins, house plant, fabric, permanent ink, latex paint
When I entered the closet this past Saturday I was immediately struck with memories of my closets in two childhood homes. My childhood closets (both too small to be rooms and yet too big to be just closets) became spaces within which I could create my own world. A closet, especially one on the larger side, brings to mind so many things for me: security, secrecy, order, chaos, reiteration, segregation, safeguarding, tranquility, privacy, melancholy, and imagination. For this exhibition, I envision an opportunity to create some of those feelings via groupings, containments, arrangements, and photography of said order. I would aim to fill the entire space of the closet, less a wee bit of space to move around in, with purple striped items. In addition to all the striped objects I currently have and would continue to make, I would incorporate actual clothing into my piece. I want to see the domestic heavily obsessed over objects in a home setting that is contained. I want to experience what it would be like to be fully surrounded by the striping. I want to create a presence through remnants.
Elizabeth Gerdeman
3rd 2nd floor bedroom
Conjecture
latex paint, plywood, tree branch, framed text on paper
14’ x 14’ x 8’ approximate room dimensions
“We are more often frightened than hurt; and we suffer more from imagination than from reality.” -Lucius Annaeus Seneca
The site-specific installations I create examine the intersections between historical and contemporary representations of nature. Beginning with the realization that landscape imagery is largely arbitrated by culture, my work is predicated on the power of attitude to affect the perception of surroundings. Focusing on the rise and fall of value ascribed to specific places, I am interested in the experience of an area through idealized representations. This work not only explores such places, but also questions how perceived fears influence the contemporary value of a place.
Timothy Jude Smith, attic space
Interior / Interior/Exterior / Exterior
2011
The intention of this installation is to create an environment where one may encounter a heightened sense of interiority and exteriority. The glass of the front-facing window has been whited-out, and the exterior environment has been replaced by a defocused video projection of what one might view from the attic. However, the viewer cannot fully access this exterior space, and is instead faced with a simulation of that which lies directly beyond the window. Since the viewer has come to this space from outside, there is still the recognition that an exterior space exists beyond this enveloped interior environment – it is just not visible. Thus, the viewer is presented with multiple layers of metaphor and meaning that represent varying degrees of experiencing interiority and exteriority.
Candace Black entry room
Wrinkle, 2011
Plaster, Lime, Lathe
This piece is a three dimensional “sketch” depicting time and the fluctuation of social happenings that occur within our dwellings. I folded the wall and gave it a loose skin-like quality to animate the life that resonated within or around it. The curved molding was cast in segments and joined during the installation. I plastered a wall that followed the curve of the warped casts. A mass of lime and molding plaster was used to join the voids between folds. These two materials, when combined, make the plaster very malleable. This made the extreme transition possible and allowed me to span the gap and continue the lines of the profile. I chose to create deep undulations in order to challenge myself with the complex joining of two loose ends; this represents the difficulty people have in reaching compromises. The wall is raw and stripped of its color and decor to separate it from the actual dwelling. On an opposite wall rests a plaster horse head with warped ornamental plaster incorporated into the neck and ears. In the middle of the room, lies a mitered corner of two converging plaster moldings that are also warped. These additional segments are added to create an environment that throws more elements of the past into the present as well as gives the installation an animal quality. It is a kind of ruin, a living chunk of architecture, torn from the past and placed in the empty room of today.
Shauna Merriman
2nd, 2nd floor bedroom
Hare Snare, 2011
14’ x 13’ x 8’ approximate room dimensions
Sylvia Doebelt staircase
"ohne Worte" "without words"
2011
Since the Franklinton house is not a typical art space, it was instantly clear to me that this would not be the place to simply present images but rather to work with the unusual environment. While I usually work in large format photography, because the house environment intrigued me, I decided to use a site-specific approach. Playing with the tradition of trompe-l'œil, I took pictures of several things in the staircase, changed them slightly, printed them out life-sized and applied them to the place where they were originally, and where I had photographed them. In that way I did not only play with photography and its reproductive character, but also with the expectations of the audience.
When beginning to climb the stairs, visitors try to hold on to the handrail only to grasp at nothing. Where the handrail once had been, that visitor will now find a photographic representation of it. Since we are so used to assuming that things are what they seem, we tend not to take a closer look at them. This tendency explains the trick, even though my pastings on the wall are by no means perfect optical illusions. Maybe the character of the house plays a role in the illusion -- not everything stuck to the Franklinton house's walls seems to be art, as one might presume in a gallery's white space. Our focus in a place like that is slightly off.
By the time the visitor realizes the handrail's not really there, he or she has already passed two more tromp l'œils at the bottom of the stairs. Not many found those. But the ones who dared to have their senses sharpened by this exhibition experienced their aha moment coming down the stairs.
It's not a trick, it's photography. Or as Hiroshi Sugimoto put it:
"However fake the subject, once photographed it's as good as real."
Sarah Weinstock 2nd 2nd floor bedroom
I'm interested in implied movement and how we come to understand that which is invisible to the naked eye. My drawings capture evidence of an outside influence on a particular substance. In this body of work, I investigate the subtle movements of a house, and how it shifts and moves over time
Timothy Jude Smith
Rooms to Let I Martin Ave. Columbus Ohio
Paul Elsner
NEITHER by Samuel Beckett
to and fro in shadow from inner to outer shadow
from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself
by way of neither
as between two lit refuges whose doors once
neared gently close, once away turned from
gently part again
beckoned back and forth and turned away
heedless of the way, intent on the one gleam
or the other
unheard footfalls only sound
till at last halt for good, absent for good
from self and other
then no sound
then gently light unfading on that unheeded
neither
unspeakable home
I have often worked with text in a visual way in which the 'message' and the image both melt into a mutual esthetic appearance of the specific site.
For 'Rooms to let II, Town St' I decided to use the above printed text called 'Neither' by Samuel Beckett.
I see that text as a hymn on perception. Perception as the only way to know we are alive - although the state of our being appears as uncertain, insecure, senseless and even if it's impossible to know how much of that is memories and illusion and how much reality - in that undetermined waiting state of our life.
The appearance and rhythm of my proposed work is suggested to be seen as a 'memento' or a 'meditation' of the human condition - virtually set into a situation of transition - while symbolically stepping over the door sill - as well represented by the transitional condition of the site itself.
Paul Elsner, 2011
Dresden, Germany - international artist in residence (The Greater Columbus Arts Council (GCAC), Columbus/OH)
Suzanne Silver
House Poem
Aluminum, salt
I have long wanted to make a house poem. Philip Levine had just been made Poet Laureate of the US and I was reading his poems on work, workers, and the American experience when I first visited the gutted house on E.Town in Franklinton. I chose to use Levine’s poem, “The House”, as part of my installation, and soon realized that it was really about a poem and not a house, although it was, in certain ways, constructed like a house and included references to family and home and emptiness. I decided that it was more about art and its making and, perhaps, even about the inadequacies of language. It is definitely about work. I would like the viewer to walk on the salt-covered floor and experience the horizontal lines of language against the vertical supports of the gutted room.
Ryan Mandell
Clare Fox
Melissa Vogley Woods
