November 16th ARTLab: Every-Body Draws

What does it mean to be connected to your own body?  How can you use your body in unconventional ways to create art?

November 16^th ARTLab: Every-Body Draws is inspired by Janine Antoni’s solo show Within, located in our 1414 Monterey Street galleries.

Antoni's artistic process is rooted in performance and gesture.  She describes her work as an exploration of what it means to be a woman and what it means to have a body.  Antoni’s show is an invitation for us, as the viewer, to connect to our own bodies and explore the interconnectedness of all things.

Janine Antoni, Graft, 2013

The resin objects on the second floor at 1414 Monterey Street were inspired by milagros, folk charms that are used for healing purposes.  In Mexico they are often in the form of tiny metal medallions representing different body parts like a leg, heart, hand, or eyes. In Spain, Portugal, and Brazil, they are often 3-dimensional wax or resin. For Antoni, the “act of making [a milagro] is a kind of prayer, a kind of intention.” Like creating a milagro, the way she approaches her work can be seen as a personal contemplation of her body. A crossed leg over a leg bone is one of the several resin milagro-inspired objects in Graft that contemplates femininity. The gesture of dragging female hip bones across wet plaster is what shaped the crown molding in Crowned as well as the clay vessels representing her artistic mothers in Gertrude, Mary, and Martha. The gesture of cutting a tree in half and piercing the trunk through the ceiling is a gesture connecting the tree--the source of the materials used to construct the building itself--as a metaphor pointing to the interconnectedness of all things to a source, just as we are connected to our flesh, our bones, and to others through the act of birth.

Janine Antoni, Crowned, 2013

In our upcoming ARTLab, visitors will discover that a gesture, a movement, or even an intention can be a process for creating art. In this installation activity, participants will experiment using branches as extensions of their body to move and create a collaborative drawing. Participants will also create their own milagros expressing thanks, making a wish for someone’s wellbeing, or happiness for themselves or others.  We will hang these handmade milagros in the garden when they are completed.

ARTLab is free with museum admission and is open to all ages.

Visiting the Mattress Factory Museum's New Exhibitions!

Karen Forney, Mattress Factory education intern, shares her thoughts:

This is an exciting time at the Mattress Factory! If you haven’t visited in a while, there’s a lot of great new work to see: THREE brand new exhibitions across three buildings, and all included in your museum admission! That’s a pretty good deal don’t you think? To sweeten the deal, I wanted to share my thoughts on the new exhibitions to give you an idea of what to expect when you visit.

  

The first thing you will notice when you come to the Mattress Factory is a large brown creature in the parking lot. That Godzilla-sized chupacabra is actually a really big prehistoric sloth, a found object installed by artist Scott Hocking, one of nine artists participating in the museum’s residency program. It welcomes visitors coming to the main building to see the show Detroit: Artists in Residence.

DETROIT: ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE

500 Sampsonia

“Here to see the museum today? Great!”

Your friendly Visitor Services Coordinator, Maria, will welcome you to the museum, take your admission, and suggest you start on the 4^th floor and work your way down. So grab your handouts, affix your museum tab to your collar, and head up to 4.

As you step out of the elevator on the 4^th floor and let the doors close behind you, pause and listen; you’ll notice a variety of mingling sounds from each of the four new Detroit installations. You’ll hear a faint murmuring of voices and music from the hanging cans in Jessica Freylinghuysen’s My City is Your City, the chiming of clocks, bells, and excerpts of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring from Frank Pahl’s 1913 Revisited in Three Parts, the ominous clanging and buzzing of power tools in Nicola Kuperus & AdamLee Miller’s Diptyching, and, more subtly, the occasional clicks of heaters and electronic devices transforming wind turbine and solar power into heat that warms the Michigan picture rocks in Design 99’s Following the Sun 2. Sound is what linked these pieces for me.

On the third floor you turn to your left from the elevator to see Cured by Russ Orlando. A blue-lit room enshrines auto parts encrusted in salt, hanging silently from shiny new meat hooks. In contrast to the 4^th floor, this room is quiet. Dead quiet, except for the stray pieces of salt that crunch between the soles of your shoes and the white tile of the floor.

Scott Hocking’s Coronal Mass Ejection is in the Mattress Factory’s lower level, a space known for it’s original cellar-like stone walls. You’ll see more of the quirky figures and beasts similar to the sloth you saw in the parking lot: a pyramid of biblical-looking figures in the back of the room, dinosaur heads hanging from the walls, and a hot metal train car, also called a torpedo car, rests like the sunken Titanic in the middle of the floor. If you’re super sure nobody is looking, do you think you might be able to climb the ladder and look into the torpedo car itself for a better look? If you feel adventurous, and nobody is looking, you should go exploring.

JANINE ANTONI -- WITHIN

1414 Monterey

When you’ve finished seeing the Detroit show and head back to the lobby, Maria will check in with you to see how you’re doing and tell you how to get to the annex gallery at 1414 Monterey to see Janine Antoni’s solo show Within.

What interests me most about Janine’s installation is her use of vast amounts of beautiful empty space. The entrance features a completely empty room leading towards a massive tree trunk and root system that has been split in half--one half on the floor, the other half floating into the ceiling. What you will discover upstairs is that the tree passes completely through the ceiling and up through the floor to become part of the table holding curious cast resin body parts and bones in Graft. Hip bones appear in several of Antoni’s installations in the building, so be on the lookout: hip bones are what shaped the raku fired bowls in Gertrude, Margaret, and Mary, and what may seem like an unused room has a bigger surprise for those who are patient and take a moment to consider the space in Crowned. You may find yourself wanting to sit for an extended period of time watching Honey Baby, a collaboration with choreographer Stephen Petronio. That’s ok; it’s what the bench is for!

CHIHARU SHIOTA -- TRACE OF MEMORY

516 Sampsonia

First of all, this building is amazing, and I think this new installation is a lovely compliment to the previous installation at this site before the building was renovated. The previous installation, In the Dwelling-House, artist Ruth Stanford researched the previous inhabitants of the house and installed tombstone-like memorials in the windows listing each family members’ names and occupations.

Similar to Stanford’s work, the webs in Trace of Memory gives form to the unseen memories of this house. Every room is a cocoon of black yarn suspending different objects in each room – a desk, a pile of books, old suitcases, chairs, a wedding dress, a single pristine white bed. Exploring this house reminded me of the heroine in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey; I felt like Catherine exploring the abbey and wondering excitedly if it was haunted, if there were any secret passageways I could discover, and what really happened in this house so long ago? In my quest, I discovered a storage closet, the bathroom, and some quirky dead-ends that you’ll always find in a fabulous old house. Every ambient sound made my hair stand on end; was that just another visitor walking around upstairs, or a ghost? I could have walked forever through that building; the presence that exists in those spaces where Shiota has woven her webs is truly haunting.

For me, installation art is unique because it is experiential. Everyone’s experience will be different, and what activates the artwork is your participation. When you go to an installation art museum, you’re not going to just see the artwork. You are going to complete the artwork by interacting with it. I think of it as a collaboration with the artist. When you think of yourself as a collaborator with the artist, that immediately makes your participation important and relevant. And I think that’s awesome!

So, fellow potential collaborators, I’ve shared my experience of the new exhibitions; now I want to hear about yours. Come visit the Mattress Factory and get a chance to be a part of this great new work in Pittsburgh, and let me know what you think by e-mailing me at eduintern@mattress.org! And stay tuned to special events coming up including ARTLabs, performances, and other educational opportunities.

MF at 35: Barbara Luderowski

We're celebrating a big milestone in 2013: the Mattress Factory's 35th anniversary! Our office has been abuzz with all of the wonderful things to come: our 35th Anniversary Bash next week, our Urban Garden Party: Soul Factory and Community Garden Party in June, the summer opening of our new building at 516 Sampsonia Way with an installation by Chiharu Shiota, our fall exhibitions Detroit Artists in Residence and Janine Antoni, as well as our 35th Anniversary Art Auction in October. So much is in front of us, we sometimes forget to look back at how we got here. If you know about the Mattress Factory, then you know about our founder, president and co-director Barbara Luderowski. Barbara, an artist herself, has a story for every year this museum has been alive. And then some. We caught her this week and asked her to talk about how the MF came to be, and this is what she had to say:

When I bought the Mattress Factory building 35 years ago, I had no idea that this is what it would end up being. 

I was looking for a new space, because I had just had a show at the Carnegie Museum and I was seeking a bigger studio. As a sculptor, I envisioned a place where I could work with other artists, because at the time, Pittsburgh didn’t have a strong identity as a city with a community of artists. I came across this huge empty building, which had formerly been a Sterns & Foster mattress factory. 

In the very early days, artists rented studios throughout the building, and we started a vegetarian co-operative restaurant to bring many different people together. We had a little bit of everything, good food, performance art, visual art, experimental theater, even a children’s theater group. There was a lot going on all over the place. It was a true collaboration.

I had absolutely no recognition, at all, that I was biting off more than I could chew. I just did it anyway. I didn’t have some grand vision all those years ago—I was just trying to create a place where I wanted to be, with other creative people. That place didn’t exist, so together we made it happen.

Even as we began to focus on installation art, we didn’t set out to become a museum. It happened organically. It came out of the energy of the art—the intersection of art and sculpture and architecture and sound and space and light. There wasn’t an end destination in mind. It has always been about the journey.

I got sucked in because it was a challenge, and it was a way to combine my interests in contemporary art, architecture, design, community development, and collaborating with other artists. When people said it couldn’t be done, we did it anyway. If we stumbled upon a problem, we went about solving it our own way.

Now, 35 years later, all I can say is, “to be continued…”

     

     Barbara Luderowski

     President and Co-Director