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.

RUSS ORLANDO: SALT OF THE EARTH

Meet Russ Orlando. Russ arrived this week for his residency at the Mattress Factory to install his work for the exhibition, Detroit: Artists in Residence. Russ holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Wayne State University and a Master of Fine Arts from Cranbrook Academy of Art, and has built his career as an artist primarily through performance, often using his own body as an impetus for social commentary. The artist's statement on his website offers:

Whether physically present in my work or creating a sculptural object, the methods I use attempt to capture the immediate in gestures, from a place that I both know and do not know. I experiment with performance, video, photography and collage, often in the same piece.

I like to explore conflict in my work, always leaving several entry points for the viewer. My natural inclination is to do things that are improvisational. To counter this, I’ll sometimes do a piece that’s very controlled and meticulous to refresh and regroup. But occasionally, I combine these two approaches. Most recently, I’ve been focusing on activating the performance in a sculptural object.

When I arrived at work this morning, Russ was standing in our administration office, clad in a mechanic's blue collared jumpsuit, stirring a pot of salt water. I would have raised an eyebrow, but things like that are more common here than not; one of the coolest aspects about working at the Mattress Factory is that we get to witness artists in action as they prepare their installations for public view. Russ invited me and my coffee out to the garden to watch him "salt" some of the pieces for his installation, which will incorporate old car parts crusted in salt. 

Russ Orlando (right) chats with MF co-director Michael Olijnyk about his project

Between hurling ladles of salty sludge at a rusted and graffiti-ed fender he pulled from a junkyard in Detroit, Russ explained that his process for this project is to not alter the original metal piece in any way, but to apply layers of salt, letting it "cure" in the sun for a few days at a time. 

Russ Orlando applies salt to metal car parts in the garden

Russ stressed that he likes to leave the way the salt adheres to the metal to chance, and referenced Richard Serra's early work with flinging red-hot lead at the wall and floor in Jasper John's studio.

I left Russ as he was dripping the last crystals of salt onto his fender and grill, wondering if the salt would eventually completely obscure that fabulous section of aqua paint on the fender. I suppose we won't know until the piece is finished--that is the exciting thing about installations at the Mattress Factory...you never know.

Save the date for the opening reception of new works by Detroit: Artists in Residence, Janine Antoni and Chiharu Shiota, September 12 from 7 - 9 p.m.
 

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