A & E

"Factory Installed," the latest exhibition to hit the Mattress Factory on the North Side, proves that this museum and laboratory for installation art really knows the secret to getting the best from the artists that are asked to create and exhibit there: give them the freedom to do what they do, and the rest -- and usually the best -- will follow.

"The Mattress Factory does not ask artists to create a specific work. (The artists) decide entirely what they are going to do and how they are going to do it," says Michael Olijnyk, curator of exhibitions.

That's why, as Olijnyk says, with this exhibition, "The chemistry clicks, and there is a cohesiveness between all of the individual artists' works."

True enough, the show does have a nice flow. Jason Peters' "Even in Darkness There Is Light" fills a blackened space with a massive tangle of interconnected white buckets from the first floor to the third floor, where an animated video installation by Kristine Marx titled "Expanding Magnetic Molten Symmetry" submerges the viewer in a sea of bar codes that dance on the walls, ceiling and floor.

Peter's piece no doubt will stun most with the sublimity he has managed to provoke with paint buckets -- about 400 in all, which he has fastened together into a continual, twisting and turning loop.

Through all of it, he has strung tubular lighting and set the light level to a warm glow via a dimmer switch. The result is a seamless space in which one cannot detect the floor from walls or ceiling. Walking through it is like walking through the illuminated intestines of a giant animal -- an amazing experience.

Upstairs, Natascha Ampunant also has altered her allotted space, but in quite the opposite way, choosing to cover up every descriptive detail of two rooms on the second floor with sheetrock and painting every surface white, including the floor. But neither room is completely blanked out, because Ampunant has installed video projections in each that play back recordings of drawings she made in both spaces prior to painting everything white. A few of them hang in the corner of one room. Simple sketches, they reveal a surprising depth that relates specifically to the two rooms involved.

On the third floor, Karyn Olivier pokes a hole right through such alterations of space -- quite literally. In her allotted room, she has ground a 3-foot circle through the layers of paint that have built up on the floor over the years. The layers speak volumes about this building, which has had countless alterations in the name of installation art.

Above the circle hangs a chandelier filled with burning candles that slowly drip wax on the floor. It's a fitting comment to the certain archaeological layering that happens in such a place, albeit in hyper speed compared to the rest of human history.

Finally, if the works of those three artists aren't enough, visitors will be rewarded in the last room they come to, which holds Marx's aforementioned video installation. In it, one will be submerged in a reflective experience like no other. That is to say, literally reflective, by way of a rather simple design that involves two large sheets of Plexiglas on one side of the darkened room that splits the tow projections that make up the piece.

As one moves around the room, illuminated stripes fill every surface, and can be seen even in the Plexiglas at different angles. It's a submersive experience that is truly a definitive example of what installation art is.

If you haven't yet been to this unique museum, this exhibition, perhaps more than any other in recent years, offers the perfect opportunity for one to understand what installation art is all about. So be sure to check it out before the exhibition closes July 9.

---

If the aforementioned works at the Mattress Factory's annex building at 1414 Monterey St. drive home the interactive and engaging nature of installation art, which they do so nicely, then artist Ruth Stanford's onslaught at another of the Mattress Factory's buildings takes the notion to the extreme.

Stanford's work at 516 Sampsonia Way began in 2004 with "What Remains," which can still be seen on the facade of the building. There she has filled each window with inscribed granite slabs that detail information -- such as name, age and occupation -- of former residents of the row house stretching back for more than a century.

But step inside this dilapidated old house -- which has been structurally secured -- and one will find that Stanford has done even more archaeological excavation into the lives of generations of former residents recently.

In each room, she has created small gestures that relate to various little discoveries she made in the house, most notably with what she found printed on various wall paper.

"On the first floor, in what once was a kitchen, I chose to re-create, in three dimensions, a colorful geometric pattern that appears in fragments on the ceiling," Stanford says. "With the addition of the sculpture and the fresh wood floor, the room becomes a gallery highlighting small details of a wallpaper pattern likely chosen 70 years ago."

Some of these gestures are quite humorous, like the sculpture of a barbecue grill that relates to a wallpaper pattern found in another room that was once a kitchen when the house was converted into apartments.

Others are a bit more odd, like the slow-motion playback of the "Thrilla in Manila" on an old black-and-white TV. The famous boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, fought at the Araneta Coliseum in the capital of the Philippines on Oct. 1, 1975, relates to a newspaper clipping about it that Stanford found under wall paper in a small bedroom.

Walking through the house is both a haunting and delightful experience. But more than anything, it is a testament to the transformative power of art.

-- Kurt Shaw

• Most Read
• Most E-mailed
• Latest News