Something Like a Phenomenon, “Between Spaces” at PS1

In Poetry, Language, Thought, Martin Heidegger describes poiesis as a transformative action that turns matter into poetry. A poetic statement doesn’t aim to provide a definitive answer, but to create a realm in which the mind can dwell.

So do the works included in Between Spaces, a group show on view at PS1 until April 5, 2010. Curated by Tim Goossens and Kate McNamara, the exhibition includes sculptures, installations, video and photography by eleven emerging and established artists who transform, recontextualize and/or combine found objects with new materials. The result is a collection of thought-provoking works that celebrate the threshold moments in which the ordinary becomes phenomenal.

Between Spaces grabs our attention with a strong succession of one-person rooms, each one featuring a sculpture/installation hybrid in which poiesis operates in a different way. The first room is devoted to Heather Rowe’s imposing Green Desert (missing the points), a group of six structures aligned to form a cohesive whole. Rowe’s work looks like a construction site - and in a conceptual sense, it is.

At first look, it’s as if what once was a single unit had been split into two long parallel sections that form an aisle wide enough for viewers to circulate. Each section is subdivided into three smaller parts crossed by narrow paths. This grid pattern borrows the typology of the suburban residential area: a street lined with evenly spaced out single-family dwellings. Each construction even has a large opening looking out to the central aisle like a bay window. But these half-built structures have been left unfinished, unfit for habitation. In this way, Green Desert becomes a metaphor for the incompleteness and dissatisfaction of the suburban lifestyle. These houses will never be homes.

A closer look at Green Desert exposes another layer of meaning. Features typically found in interiors - mirrors, painted walls, slats from hard-wood floors - face the outside of the sculpture, while its central aisle is made up of unfinished wood beams and panels of sheetrock still bearing their manufacturing codes. It’s as if the wall separating two rooms had been ripped apart. Viewers find themselves literally between spaces, outsiders on the inside (and vice versa).

Looking closer still, one notices small, inconspicuous openings outfitted with angled mirrors that reveal elements of home décor such as plush carpeting, wallpaper, picture frames and decorative moldings. Now the house’s interior seems to have been crammed inside its walls. These nooks and crannies must be explored individually by moving around and through the structure, an experience not unlike that of visiting an unfamiliar house (or a once-familiar one rendered strange by the passage of time) and of (re-)discovering the unique character of each room.

Rowe’s sculpture transports viewers to a fragmented reality in which they find themselves simultaneously on a street, inside a house and between the house’s walls. For anyone who grew up in a suburb that felt like a comforting trap, Green Desert (missing the points) represents an unsettling homecoming.

Further into Between Spaces, the work of Zak Kitnick sets poetry in motion by making the ordinary special again. Kitnick’s sculptural grouping illustrates the way visual paradigms cycle from so-called high culture to everyday life and back. In the center of the exhibition’s third room, patterned vinyl tiles are arranged in a perfect square, like a showroom reconstruction of a suburban kitchen floor. Viewers are encouraged to walk on the tiles, reinforcing their lack of artistic value. This commodity sculpture acts as a foil for a trio of square, life-sized reproductions of the tiles’ pattern, each one rendered in a different ratio of brass, copper and bronze, and equipped with its own built-in vitrine. Gleaming like jewels and safe behind their protective cases, kitchen tiles become works of art.

Kitnick charts the transition from floor to gallery wall, from functional object to art object, through the arrangement of those elements. Two of his assemblages lean against the wall near the tiled area, while the third one is installed at eye level on the wall above them, hung at a forty-five degree angle so that viewers may perceive its shape as a diamond rather than a square. As the eye moves from the tiled floor to the leaning pieces to the fully transformed and recontextualized assemblage on the wall (which barely acknowledges its humble origins), Kitnick demonstrates how a change of materials and context can transform consumer goods into fine art.

Over the past century, motifs stemming from art movements like De Stijl, constructivism and geometric abstraction have filtered down through material culture and then trickled on down into mass produced home furnishings. By using a common object featuring a pattern that reflects those influences as the starting point of a new work of art, Kitnick completes the cycle, turning the ordinary back into art.

David Altmejd offers up a more whimsical kind of poetry, one in which the shift is in progress, the magic still brewing. His latest sculpture represents a large, multicolored winged creature seemingly maturing before our eyes inside a Plexiglas box. Dramatically lit from above and densely packed with symbolism, Altmejd’s vivarium brings Between Spaces to a fever pitch.

Here again, the temptation to read the work as an iconographic puzzle is irresistible. The figure looks like a cyber-punk Nike, sporting arms like clear guitar necks and several sets of wings. Gold chains drape over its architectural spine, evoking both gilding and constraint, and strategically placed crystal formations provide protection and healing. The figure doesn’t seem quite ready to emerge from its Plexiglas womb yet, but Altmejd has provided a vaginal opening on one side of the box to indicate the animal origins of this machine-like organism. At once grotesque and majestic, Altmejd’s sculpture seems to portray the gestation of a creative idea.

In the lower corner of the box, Plexiglas spools issue multicolored thread that form a geometric root structure and then stretch into rainbow formations, partly covering the creature’s face and wings. Here, creation is represented as a process akin to textile arts, in which initially distinct strands combine to form a new being or concept. The box itself could be seen as a loom weaving the fabric of life/knowledge/reality.

As beguiling as Between Spaces gets – and the pieces described above are only a few of the exhibition’s many high notes – it loses its curatorial focus when Goossens and McNamara decide to show the work of two artists per room. Although a few pairings are perfect matches, most of them seem arbitrary and uneven; the stronger work would have been more affecting if it had been shown on its own. Still, Between Spaces creates ruptures in the fabric of life that let us glimpse at stranger realms beyond. It offers a new outlook that makes the everyday transcendent. It lets poiesis work its magic.