Based in communities ranging from Beijing to Berlin, the 11 artists invited by MOCA associate curator Megan Lykins Reich to take part in the show There Goes the Neighborhood deal in one way or another with the transformations and transitions of living space in the contemporary world.
Often deriving his tentative scenes from collages of
construction-site photos, Matthew Kolodziej uses squeeze bottles filled
with acrylic paint and gel to flesh out and further distort already
confusing imagery. Places that are being built or torn down are already
hard to get a handle on, and Kolodziej doggedly makes the situation
much worse. The intense energy of change is Kolodziej’s real subject.
His paintings ebb and eddy, part birthday cake, part traffic jam.
Tremont dweller Amy Casey’s abandoned factories and Ohio City-style
shotgun houses are also in motion, but evoke suspense rather than
energy. They’re stuck on a forest of poles, mashed together into mock
towers or roped together like flies in a spider web. The fairy tale
they were part of has been indefinitely postponed.
Clevelander Kristin Bly’s installation “Sparrow,” conceived and
designed by Bly and constructed with the support of Greater Cleveland
Habitat for Humanity Re-Store, is a ghost house — or the front
porch of one. It stands in for the history and dignity of lives
forgotten in hard times. Visitors are invited to mount the steps and
take in the “view,” a video loop of sights and sounds recorded on
abandoned porches of foreclosed dwellings all over town. The knocker on
the front door, opening only to the past, is made of two heads, joined
in a kiss with each rap.
Much of the rest of the show also deals with the impact of neglect
and disaster on the living conditions of populations around the world.
New Orleans artist Willie Birch shows strong acrylic and charcoal
drawings of Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath, while Brazilian photographer
Dionisio Gonzàlez displays altered large-scale c-prints of Sao
Paolo shantytowns and rural Vietnamese villages. German filmmaker
Clemens von Wedemeyer explores facets of an abandoned East German
housing project and a construction site for new homes.
After spending time in Barcelona, Brooklyn-based artist Eva Struble
made several large-scale, wall-mounted constructions from cut paper
dealing with Romani cultural defiance in a changing neighborhood in
that Spanish city. Brooklynites Leslie Grant and Nina Pessin-Whedbee
stay closer to home, documenting different dimensions of the history
and present of the Domino Sugar Refinery, a Brooklyn feature since
about 1850, slated for large-scale renovation.
London’s Catherine Yass shows a video of a barge at Three Gorges Dam
in China, moving slowly through gargantuan locks; somewhere beneath the
waters lie hundreds of drowned villages. Since 2007, Beijing’s Cao Fei
has used the cyberspace role-playing game Second Life to build
an island city, home to her avatar China Tracy. If our daily world runs
out of love or jobs or room, limitless digital realms still beckon to
the infinite human imagination.
This article appears in Aug 12-18, 2009.