Installations often walk a fine line between art and architecture, if not simply because of their scale. The rooms at MoMA/PS1 in Long Island City, Queens, do an especially good job of facilitating this odd scalar disposition, perhaps because of the building’s own history as a school and then an art gallery. The variety of spaces allows a variety of types of installation with different effects.
Images courtesy Samara Golden
In The Flat Side of The Knife, Los Angeles artist Samara Golden filled a two-story space with a surreal domestic landscape complete with staircases, couches, beds, fans, tables, lamps, and instruments. The objects are made of reflective foam insulation coated in resin, and brought to life with music and distorted video projection.
Mirrors further distort the objects to create a space that is only half-architectural. It contains typical elements seen in the domestic landscape arranged so that they look normal at first, but foreign with another glance. The fully spatial but not architectural space is not chairs, couches, and pianos, but images of these. When reflected, a new space is created that is even more fake.
The Fireplace, 2013
Mass Murder, 2014
The artist describes them as ‘layers of consciousness’ that explore the space and friction between optimism and pessimism, tragedy and tranquility by shocking the system into thinking that it is all architecture. Similar tactics are used in her 2013 piece, The Fireplace at MOCA, or 2014’s Mass Murder at Night Gallery, both in Los Angeles. Eerie domestic landscapes have no honest boundary, leaving the haunting objects floating in space.
The Flat Side of The Knife is on view through August 30, 2015 at MoMA/PS1
via designboom