An encounter with the unpredictable — a visual, a thought, a configuration — is a hallmark of a Mattress Factory visit and that titillating tension hovers over visitors touring the North Side museum’s 40th anniversary exhibition.
The six artists selected for this milestone show reflect the range of expression that has been presented by the museum over four decades, from the enthusiastically immersive to the conceptually engaging.
The museum’s focus has been on site-specific installation art typically made by an artist or artists in residence. In early years, visiting artists stayed in the “Bed Sitting Rooms for an Artist in Residence” that were created in 1988 by exhibiting artist Allan Wexler.
The museum has since opened a residency unit elsewhere in the neighborhood, but Mr. Wexler’s ingeniously designed rooms remain as part of a small but select permanent collection.
His current exhibition, “Sculpting Gravity,” comprises work from various periods that reveal a wry sense of humor and an inquiring mind that disrupts conventional ways of thinking (or not) about our world. Levels and wedges re-orient assumptions about gravity in three-dimensional works like “Slanting Table/Reslanting China.” Beautifully rendered imagery like “Monolith with Wedges,” from a recent series of hand-worked inkjet prints, “Breaking Ground,” raise questions about our impact upon and relationship to the land.
In the adjacent gallery, Meg Webster’s “Solar Grow Room” is a sensual bath of color, form and scent. Known for the earthworks she exhibited at the museum in 1984, the artist this time has organic matter living and thriving under a bank of LED grow lights powered by an off-grid solar electrical system. The lights give the room a rosy cast and distorting Mylar-lined walls suggest aquarium as well as terrarium.
Ms. Webster was inspired by the decline of honeybees due to habitat loss and the overuse of pesticides. The original plants will move to a nearby yard in the spring to provide blossoms for native bee populations. At the exhibition’s end, an indoor replacement planting and the planters will found a second bee plot.
Cuban Yoan Capote, who exhibited in 2004, will install work in the museum’s lower level early next year. In the meantime, enjoy Ezra Masch's held-over "Stations," an uncanny simulation of movement, as though one were standing in a subway train as it pulls out of the station and gains speed.
The remaining artworks are at the 1414 Monterey St. satellite gallery a block away.
One encounters Vanessa German’s “sometimes we. cannot. be. with. our. bodies.” Text fills the building’s windows. On one side of the entry is the poetic, seemingly stream of consciousness commentary which she performs nationally and has dubbed "spoken word opera." On the other, quotes from the writings of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and novelist Yaa Gyasi.
An African-American and Homewood resident, Ms. German is founder of the Art House, a creative space for neighborhood children. Her mixed media sculpture, exhibited at the museum in 2005, addressed issues related to racism and to ancestral history, and she continues to explore those here.
Inside are several wall-hung female busts. Painted white, their full lips are made of cowrie shells and their elaborate hair arrangements are integrated with objects that stereotypically represent black and white culture. The effect is an eerie blending of mounted trophy heads and the neoclassical busts of 18th-century French sculptor Jean-Antoine Houdon.
But her tour de force is a parade of vividly colored figures formed of countless found objects that would be carnivalesque, even festive, except that the figures are headless and therefore grotesque rather than celebratory. A soundtrack speaks to unwarranted deaths of black or gay individuals.
Continue up the stairs to David Pohl’s evocative “furniture music,” which gives visual form to the music of Erik Satie, punctuating the room like ringing church bells or a ticking clock. The room’s splotchy wallpaper, withered and dried flora and rusted chair reference the French composer’s desolate late years. Mr. Pohl exhibited at the museum in 2001.
David Ellis also evokes place in the swirling abstracts and oversized birds of “Summer Quintet #17,” a series of motion-filled, intensely layered and colored paintings made during a four-month residency in Florida after Hurricane Matthew struck in 2016. He exhibited at the museum in 2008.
A special component of the anniversary exhibition comprises artworks and other materials from the “Greer Lankton Archive of the Mattress Factory, 1975-96,” which will be covered in a future article. Don’t miss that, the permanent collection works and Dennis Maher’s three-story “A Second Home” in the 516 Sampsonia Way satellite gallery.
Note that timed tickets (free with museum admission) are assigned on weekends for the Maher work and James Turrell’s “Pleiades” in the permanent collection. A cafe serves coffee and lunch.
“New Installations: 40th Year” continues through July 29. Hours are 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 1-5 p.m. Sunday. Closed Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and New Year's Eve. Admission is $20, seniors and students $15, veterans $10 and ages 5 and under and members free. Half-price admission for residents of 15212, 15214 and 15233 zip codes and on Tuesdays. Information: www.mattress.org or 412-231-3169.
M. Thomas: mthomas@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1925.
First Published: November 24, 2017, 2:00 p.m.