Tiny art: exhibits from the Mattress Factory

“Gestures”

Through April 6

The Mattress Factory

500 Sampsonia Way

(412) 231-3169… “Gestures”

Through April 6

The Mattress Factory

500 Sampsonia Way

(412) 231-3169

Maybe we just need some space, some time to think things over. In a small corner of the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette political cartoonist Rob Rogers makes it possible with his star-spangled installation to quit beating around the bush, to stand up and make a decision – “those who are for us and those who are against us.” You don’t need a freedom fest, you don’t need a die-in. All you need is about 30 seconds and 50 cents to choose between good and evil. Step right up and purchase a “morality button” from one of two bubble gum machines. Hmmm. Good. Evil. Good. Evil. I pick good!

“Fifty-Cent Morality” is one of the 11 serendipitous works in the latest Gestures exhibition of installations at the Mattress Factory. “Most curators would stay awake at night worrying about the outcome. It is chance that makes these shows work … Like us, the public will have to wait and see,” said Michael Olijnyk, Mattress Factory’s curator of exhibitions.

Gestures exhibitions typically include works by people from a variety of occupations. Among the creators in this exhibition are a gardener, a shopkeeper and a museum director.

When the impermanence of pieces constructed from transitory, lightweight materials, such as postcards, eyeglasses and broccoli, is integrated with sensitivity to the physical space, the installations convey fresh, fluid inspiration and creative honesty. Some of the works in the exhibit do not appear to have been created from a reaction to the space itself, but rather from a disjunction between the gallery and the artist’s vision. The artists who have used space to emphasize subjects and materials engage the audience.

One artist who incorporates space and materials especially well even draws gasps of delight. Robin Stanaway’s “Collective Corrected Vision” wires together a few hundred pairs of spectacles into a tapestry of lenses that drapes across the gallery’s steep and narrow upper stairwell. Two white spotlights illuminate the matrix of lenses from above and below; the light is reflected and refracted into rich dappled patterns on the stairwell ceiling, walls and the stairs. Sunglasses in the sculpture add a dash of color. The effect is striking and evokes imagery of sunlight streaming through leafy treetops and, perhaps, some wistfulness regarding the eyeglasses’ previous owners.

Art imitates life and life imitates art – literally – in “Seedling Painting” and “Cotyledon Gesture Paintings,” companion pieces by Liz Reed. In a small square upstairs room, Reed mirrors an elevated plane of potted seedlings under a window with a grid of square watercolor paintings of the same seedlings on the opposite wall. The real seedlings are arranged so that different species of plant appear grouped together into diagonal “strokes” of life. The obvious parallel between the plants and their portraits is followed immediately by other connections. The works are fertile with coincidence.

Paul Schifino creates a visual pun in “Portrait of James Church (sort of).” In his artist’s statement, he explains, “James Church is a friend of mine… a Pittsburgh-based artist whose work I admire. I just liked his name and the idea of using it as the concept for this piece.”

The work is an enlarged photo of James Dean cut and reassembled into a model of a building with a steeple, hung on a wall. While refreshing with its integration of the visual and the literal, this work introduces the artist’s space onto the Mattress Factory wall without taking advantage of the installation space as a tool of expression.

The best art at Gestures exhibitions at the Mattress Factory, a leading facility for installation art in the United States, is the “art you can get into.”