The latest iteration of "Gestures," the Mattress Factory's ongoing exhibition series of small site-specific works made by locals that began in 2001, is much smaller than those of the past.
It's not smaller in the number of participants, which at 10 is pretty much the usual, but in the size of the actual space the exhibition takes up, this time confined to the fourth floor of the museum's main building on Sampsonia Way rather than the near entirety of the annex building on Monterey Street.
But even though space is at a minimum, the contributors have made more than good use of it making sure that the notion of "site-specific" is not lost.
In fact, think site-specific and that's exactly what you get with artist Maggie Haas' piece "Bower." It's a mixed-media bird's nest, complete with colorful fluorescent bird droppings, made of everything from wire, wax and eggshells, and it fills a small hole high up in a wall separating two galleries that once held a heating pipe.
Mattress Factory's curator of exhibitions Michael Olijnyk, along with art critic and author Graham Shearing, have been the curators of the series since its inception, which began as an idea the two had to create an exhibition that brought together participants from varying creative disciplines to create small site-specific works of art.
"We've kept all the notes from the very first one we did and we just keep on flipping through those notes," Olijnyk says. "There are people who were on the very first list that have done something for this show."
Likewise, the participants and their respective backgrounds are just as diverse in this show as the first, having included among artists a window dresser, a party planner, a fiction writer and a fashion designer.
In fact, window dresser Thommy Conroy's piece, "Yes, let's go" is the first piece visitors will confront when coming off of the elevator.
Two weeks prior to the show's June 4 opening, this reviewer ran into Conroy at an art opening and, knowing he was one of the ones just chosen for the upcoming exhibition, asked what he planned to do. Not sure, he responded "You'll have to wait and see."
That's pretty much how it is with these exhibitions, with Olijnyk and Shearing giving a call to the selected participants anywhere from two weeks to one month prior to the opening. There is little time to gather one's thoughts and creative ideas.
Conroy pulled through nicely though, producing a classically styled though quickly rendered mural of nude young men to which is attached a chair and stag head announcing buck season is open.
"There's no way to connect them, which I think is a good thing," Olijnyk says in regard to all of the pieces in the show. "These shows are almost like a living thing. We start them, they happen and then we're on to the next one. We see them as these short kind of ideas -- a gesture thing."
Of course, that doesn't always mean that the best work results, and some artists seem to crack under the pressure of such short time constraints resulting in less-than-interesting works, as is the case with Barbara Weissberger's mural and Brian Holderman's digital print montage.
The remaining works though are inspired, with metalsmith-fabricator Ed Parrish piece "Infant Stars of a Flora Cloud Formation" employing an equal ingenious use of space as the aforementioned piece by Haas.
For the piece, Parrish filled a hole in the ceiling in one room with a waterfall, for lack of a better word, of pink scented garbage bags filled with packing peanuts. Spewing forth like giant fronds, each tendril ends in an island of cast aluminum that features green Lilliputian trees atop baby blue doilies.
Hats off also goes to author Boice-Terrel Allen, who filled an entire room with various small installation-type set-ups that stage several different characters in the author's own soon to be released novel and short story collection.
But most ingenious is the work of SO AD, two architects -- David Burns and Abigail Hart Gray -- who filled the entirety of a doorway with three-inch-wide strips of corrugated plastic sheeting. The stacked strips of sheeting produce a most interesting visual effect when looking through them at various distances.
Finally, both Gavin Benjamin and Nami Ogawa complete the show with Benjamin presenting a Renaissance-styled work for the modern-day masses with the highly shellacked photo montage "Nancy Boys" and Ogawa continuing her own conceptual explorations of clothing with her ghost-like piece whose title translates as "you tie lid a tsu," which refers to the notion, according to the artist, of the "spirit -- separating from your actual body and taking off."
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