Material of Everyday Life

Courtesy James Cohan Gallery.

The domestic realm and it’s furnishings from the past to present inspire several shows currently on view in Chelsea. At James Cohan Gallery, 13 artists including Fred Tomaselli and Kara Walker present commissioned tapestries, updated versions of those out-of-fashion textiles. You’re invited to Miyako Yoshinaga’s gallery for a stay at the Five Star Cardboard created by the Swiss designer/artist duo of Kueng Caputo.  Designed with your comfort in mind, come lie down and rest in this portable yet cozy hotel room. Virgil Marti once again transforms Elizabeth Dee gallery into a unique interior by channeling a variety of sources from 18th century Chippendale mirrors to memorial wreaths left on Elvis Presley’s grave.

Virgil Marti 
Elizabeth Dee Gallery - 545 West 20th Street
until February 20, 2010

1. Demons, Yarns, & Tales: Tapestries by Contemporary Artists

Tapestries were originally created as large-scale decorations and used to help keep those drafty castles warm. Today, we usually think of the wall coverings in historic terms and sometimes even beloved when it comes to a favorite like The Unicorn Tapestries, 1495-1505.   

When Chris and Suzanne Sharp owners of the Rug Company in London decided to start up Banners of Persuasion they based their tapestry project on the Renaissance model of commissioning an artist to create the tapestry and having a workshop produce the design. The tapestry workshop was set up in a rural community north of Shanghai and utilized traditional Flemish weaving techniques.    

Paul Noble. Villa Joe, 2008. Copyright Paul Noble. Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, Banners of Persuasion and Gagosian Gallery, New York

The Sharps approached artists they admired but it took a lot of convincing because as they recounted “nobody’s done much with tapestry recently.” The artists began with either pre-existing work or created new work. In a process that took many months, each piece was then scaled up to monumental size and re-drawn on graph paper. This full-size graph contained an outline drawing of the design with precise notes about the colors for the weaver to follow while working on the loom.  It took 3 years to fabricate the tapestries on view.

As you study this bleak expanse, take in the numerous details from tiny rocks to towering stone formations, possibly sculptures. Towards the lower left corner, you’ll discover the transparent Villa Joe. What is it filled with? Don’t miss from your aerial point of view how the wings of the villa spell out it’s name: Joe. Do you agree with Smith that there’s a big turd sitting in front of villa?

Fred Tomaselli. After Migrant Fruit Thugs, 2008. Copyright Fred Tomaselli. Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery and Banners of Persuasion.

In an interview about the tapestry project, Tomaselli revealed that he got hooked when he visited Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2002.  ”There’s something in the warp and the woof of those weaves that remind me very much of pixilation.”

For Tomaselli, the challenge was translating into a flat woven surface his multi-media work that consists of paint, collage, and real items including leaves suspended in layers of resin.  He decided to revisit a previous work Migrant Fruit Thugs, 2006. “I’ve always been really inspired by applied arts that aren’t exactly painting or craft, like marquetry and tapestry, and I’ve allowed those influences to be a part of my work. So it was interesting for me to go back to the source and to make a tapestry out of a work that was probably initially inspired by a tapestry.”        

Notice how Tomaselli conveys a sense of space by using black matte wool for the background and in contrast silk thread to depict the birds and foliage. The veins in the leaves are metallic thread “to impart their life force”, Tomaselli said.

Gavin Turk. Mappa Del Mundo, 2008. Copyright Gavin Turk. Courtesy of James Cohan Gallery, Banners of Persuasion and Sean Kelly, New York.

While the other artists looked to their own work as the source material for their tapestries, Turk decided to look at another artist’s work, Aligehiero e Boetti’s embroidered world maps (see ARTimeNY Plan Collaborative Histories).  Known for making bronze casts of trash-filled garbage bags, Turk wondered, “if it was possible to do something that combined my interest in waste with a Boetti kind of image…. if we could make the map out of rubbish that we found on the street.”

Notice how the continents consist of smashed boxes and cans. Turk equated this challenge with the one facing painters for centuries: to make three-dimensional objects two-dimensional. Here, he felt the additional challenge was that “you start with a three-dimensional object and then it gets crushed… it’s sculpture to flat.”

Boetti originally used flags to represent the different countries. What does Turk suggest by the use of mass-produced products appearing as litter?

2. Kueng Caputo, Five Star Cardboard

After studying the tapestries, you may need to take a rest!  Head over to Five Star Cardboard, a hotel room that offers a place of comfort and relaxation.  You may be surprised when you enter the gallery to encounter what appears to be a white cardboard box.  Although in NYC we may associate it with a street shelter, you will quickly discover a cozy interior with a mattress and pillow.

Experience it…

We encourage you to take advantage and lie down. What you do think? The innovative interior design features decorative pop-outs and soft LED lights. It’s quite remarkable how a simple inexpensive structure can provide a private relaxing space even with your legs hanging out!! 

Think about it…

Sarah Kueng and Lovis Caputo met in school at HGKZ, Department of Industrial Design in Zurich, Switzerland and have been collaborating as Kueng Caputo since 2006. They share the vision to re-think what people need and provide it using low-cost ordinary materials.    

The hotel room concept originated with the idea of going on holiday without leaving your hometown, especially for people who don’t have the opportunity to travel. It’s a basic but thoughtful twist on creating a new private space within the familiar and often busy public realm. Debuting first in 2006 as the 72 Hours Hotel, Kueng Caputo revised it in 2007 as the Five Star Cardboard for SaloneSatellite, the furniture fair in Milan. They set up 4 different cardboard suites in their booth and the rooms provided a place of rest for weary fair attendees. They had to limit the time guests rested because the lines to stay in the hotel rooms were so long! 

The theme of the suite on view is the jungle, Bosco di Hawaii. Check out the models guests can choose from such as Classico Romantico, Italian Lover, and Sogni di Bambini. A form most familiar to us from children’s books, the laser-cut pop-outs transform the bland interiors into intimate sites of reverie. The instructional video demonstrates the hotel room’s portability as well as it’s very quick and easy set-up. 

Similarly, look carefully at the DIY lamp and you can figure out how to assemble it. Despite the initial make-shift quality of Kueng Caputo’s work, extended looking reveals an aesthetic rooted in the history of design. The lamp is based on the Easy-to-Assemble Furniture by Enzo Mari, an influential Italian designer who in the 1970s created instruction-based furniture plans. In the spirit of Mari who wrote, “anyone apart from factories and traders, can use the designs to make them by themselves”, Kueng Caputo provide the lamp’s assembly instructions on their website. 

On a playful note, Kueng Caputo also present DIY Table Scenery which give adults and children alike the opportunity to make their own table decorations from a corrugated cardboard cast of fish, birds, coral and more. 

3. Virgil Marti

From the DIY simplicity of Kueng Caputo, move on to the kitsch and excess of Virgil Marti’s installation of wallpapers, mirrors and furniture. Marti’s work moves through the history of interiors combining references as diverse as Louis Comfort Tiffany, English designer Paul Smith, and 1970s fluorescent flocked wall paper. Marti’s Grow Room  in the 2004 Whitney Biennial was based on James McNeill Whistler’s Peacock Room and featured mirrored Mylar panels silkscreened with macramé webs spun by drugged spiders as well as Venetian-style cast resin chandeliers in the shape of deer antlers with flowers at their tips.

As you step through the gallery door, a floor-to-ceiling wall greets you with a dynamic pattern that upon closer inspection turns out to be the repeated image of colorful floral wreaths left at Elvis Presley’s grave site. Memorial Garden is an ink jet print and notice the labor intensive application of the out-of-style textured flocking.

Compare Memorial Garden wallpaper with Austrian Swag, a trompe-l’oeil drapery design of silky white fabric screen-printed on Tyveck, the tough synthetic material of envelopes and other products! What does the drapery remind you of? What effect does it create in the room?

Peer into the large mirrors. Marti creates them by cutting uneven floor boards into shapes derived from 18th century Chippendale mirrors. They are then cast in urethane and dipped into colored chrome plating Can you see your reflection? What’s your impression of them?  

In her artnet review, Elisabeth Kley offers “they hang like pictures with their faces to the wall, or worn-out mirrors that glitter but refuse to reflect.”  The gallery press release suggests they “might be more accurately described as monochromatic paintings”.

Think about it…

Imagine representing your parents as poufs! Inspired by Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black commonly known as Whistler’s Mother, the 2 large circular settees serve as abstracted portraits of Marti’s parents. Which do you think is Mom? Dad? Is the flowered chintz a give-away?  

In her TimeOut review, Merrily Kerr expresses her disappointment that visitors can’t sit on them or have an impromptu gathering. How do you feel about it?

Hear from the artist…