Chandeliers, buckets and big ideas

“Factory Installed”

Natasha Ampunant, Kristine Marx, Karyn Olivier and Jason Peters

Through… “Factory Installed”

Natasha Ampunant, Kristine Marx, Karyn Olivier and Jason Peters

Through July 9

Mattress Factory

500 Sampsonia Way ‘ 1414 Monterey St.

(412) 231-3169

With four new installations, the Mattress Factory offers a great way to see some distinctive art in the city before the semester ends.

The museum’s latest exhibit, “Factory Installed,” is currently on display in the Mattress Factory’s Monterey Street building.

“Factory Installed” is the work of Natasha Ampunant, Kristine Marx, Karyn Olivier and Jason Peters, who served as artists in residence at the Mattress Factory. For the past several months, they have been living at the Mattress Factory while developing and working on their installations.

These four artists, who come from different parts of the world, make up one of the museum’s smaller exhibitions. Yet, each artist presents a completely unique way of installation making, creating a show that flaunts the many avenues that installation art can present.

Ampunant’s “Same Place in October (Leaning)” is a two-room work of art that projects videos onto a wall in one room and a makeshift workbench in the other. Both explore similar ideas by using color and lines to create an illusory effect where the actual paper and other objects on the wall and bench seem to interact with the video.

Using a simple video in which a hand cuts paper and reveals a different color of paper below and lays it on top of a real sheet of paper, Ampunant’s work baffles one at first as the video and real world seem to melt into one.

“Expanding Magnetic Molten Symmetry” is a video installation by Marx in which the two projectors are run through a sheet of Plexiglas in the middle of the room and mirror the images being shown.

“I wanted to make a video that would surround the viewer,” Marx explains in her artistic statement. “By entering the work, rather than watching the video from one point of view, the viewer experiences the piece from various perspectives.”

This creates a space where one can walk through the video and encounter it as it changes. The images start out as simple patterns of lines, but grow into large, disorienting patterns that engulf those who walk through the installation.

Originally from Trinidad and Tobago, Olivier’s “Grey Lift” is an elegant chandelier hanging at eye-level in the middle if the room.

The chandelier is actually lit by candles that continually burn wax. The spillover from these candles forms a buildup of wax on the floor beneath the chandelier. Against the more elaborate pieces that tend to occupy the Mattress Factory, Olivier’s work stands out because of its simplistic beauty.

Peter’s “Dark Matter” and “Even in Darkness There is Light” stand in juxtaposition to the each other. Both are spiraling designs made up of interconnected plastic buckets.

“Dark Matter” is a smaller piece made up of black buckets in a bright space. “Even in Darkness There is Light” stands in opposition to this, using white buckets with rope lights strung throughout the sculpture in a completely dark space. This sculpture creates incandescent tubing that twists throughout the room.

One of Peter’s stated goals with his art is “creating moments in time that cause people to contemplate or reconsider their values or ideas of time, space and objects.”

Perhaps the interesting thing about all of these works is their relation to space and time: These installations change both over time and as we move through them.

An interesting thing about the Monterey Street gallery is that one has to go through the works successively, and then go back through them again in order to exit. This shouldn’t be taken for granted, and one should give these works a second viewing to re-experience the art in a different time and with a different sense of space.

The Mattress Factory will also be opening another new exhibit by Ruth Stanford, “In the Dwelling-House,” on April 29.