A & E

Last month, visitors to the opening reception of the exhibition "Inner Outer Space" at the Mattress Factory couldn't help but stare at the floor in a room on the fourth floor. For, cut into it was a 6-foot-wide hole.

Looking down the hole, which is actually an artwork by New York City-based artist Sarah Oppenheimer, all one could see was the roof of a garage across the alley from the museum. That's because Oppenheimer had purposely directed the view to a third-floor window via a carefully crafted tunnel made of plywood that angled through the third-floor gallery below.

In a place known for pushing the limits, not to mention the boundaries, of its own space, this is the first time in the museum's 30-year history that an artist has reconfigured the building structure in this way.

The hole is still there and just as disorienting to say the least. "The idea is to create a form that directs the gaze of the viewer," says exhibition organizer Dara Meyers-Kingsley, "kind of like a filmmaker forces an audience to view the world as he sees it."

An independent curator from Pleasantville, N.Y., Meyers-Kingsley has organized exhibitions on and off in Pittsburgh ever since she first worked with the founding team that set up The Andy Warhol Museum 15 years ago. "Inner Outer Space" is her latest Pittsburgh project. It was two years in the making and involved nine artists from six countries.

Meyers-Kingsley says the theme for this show grew from wanting to have a connection with James Turrell's and Yayoi Kusama's permanent installations at the museum. "Both of those works are about inner and outer space," Meyers-Kingsley says, pointing out that Turrell's piece "Danae" (1983) plays with the viewer's visual perception of what's inside and outside on what appears to be a single plane of light, while Kusama's piece "Infinity Dots Mirrored Room" (1996), blows out the notion of self into infinity by way of endlessly reflecting mirrors.

"I wasn't given that as mandate by the Mattress Factory," says Meyers-Kingsley, "but I felt that anyone walking through (the museum) would feel that all of the work in the whole building would be related to each other."

Additionally, Meyers-Kingsley says, the conceptual underpinning for the exhibition also relates to the form and content of the work, as well as each artist's own unique approach to the pieces they created for the exhibition.

For example, Oppenheimer isn't the only artist whose installation takes advantage of both inside and outside the Mattress Factory building. Based on the car crash that inspired Marinetti's revelation of the Futurist Manifesto in 1909, Italian artist Luca Buvoli has created a sculptural work that depicts a 1908 Fiat in motion, the instant before the impact. Looking like something straight out of Kennywood, the ersatz car is recreated in multiple, connected forms comprised of steel and fiberglass that rush toward and out a window.

And Bahamian artist Tavares Strachan takes advantage of the museum's parking lot, using it as the spot to locate a trailer that houses all of the computers necessary to operate a robot rover he has located in one darkened gallery in the museum. Set up like a lunar landing inspired by the landscape of the north star, Polaris, complete with coal instead of rocks, the gallery terrain is recorded by the roving robot as it analyzes data as if on another planet. The data is in turn sent back to the trailer by the robot where it is output on monitors and printouts.

The robot is named "Robbie" after the first African-American astronaut, Air Force Maj. Robert H. Lawrence, who was killed during a training mission accident. A poignant and rather resonant homage, given that Polaris is a dead star.

Strachan worked with scientists at Carnegie Mellon and Yale universities to create the piece, which brings up another interesting aspect of the exhibition, and that is the involvement by a few of the artists with outside, albeit local, sources, engaging other Pittsburghers to share and implement their ideas.

For example, Irish artist Mark Garry had Pittsburgh artist Anne Angyal help him translate his drawing of the skyline surrounding the museum into a musical composition punched out of paper and played on two componiums (music boxes), for his piece "Being Here." And New York artist Allison Smith asked local potter Bernard Jakub, who maintains a studio in the Firehouse Studios just a few blacks away on Arch Street, to create stoneware crockery for her piece "Jugs, Pitchers, Bottles, and Crocks, Household Linens and Yardage in Stock." The piece replicates a country store selling these items, which Smith herself adorned with slogans and designs related to the Iraq War, global warming, genetic engineering and homeland security threats.

Finally, Brooklyn painter David Ellis' work is as far reaching as possible given that his video "FLY" can currently be seen on the High School for the Creative and Performing Arts' electronic billboard, Downtown. It features Ellis running, sliding and falling through gallons upon gallons of wet paint and was filmed entirely in an enclosed hut set up in the Mattress Factory lobby before the exhibition opened.

The enclosure is gone now, and only a few of Ellis' paintings remain. But the video, as well as one near the elevator and a four-channel video in the basement all document the 15 days straight that Ellis spent painting, repainting and ultimately submerging himself in paint. The ultimate decadent dream of a painter, the paintings he created are gone -- obliterated by the artist mostly -- but the dream remains onscreen for all to enjoy.

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