A Room of One's Own

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A Room of One's OwnNo Name Exhibitions showcases art on the other side of the tracks.

by Julie Caniglia

          As arts venues go, The Soap Factory has little in common with any others in the Cities. It's more than a simple lack of air conditioning--which, after a summer of being refrigerated in various galleries and museums, is actually a relief. Sunlight streams through the windows of this old building, and its huge doors are thrown open to a view of railroad tracks and the Mississippi beyond. Sure, there's a slightly funky odor floating up from the basement (soapy, in fact), but like the smell of hay and manure in a barn, it's a reminder that you're in a place as opposed to a space. The occasional chirp of crickets adds to the effect.

          Then there's the art. No local commercial gallery could--and probably no museum would--undertake a project like Room, the exhibition that currently fills much of the Factory's vast and varied square footage with 23 installation works. So how was it accomplished by No Name Exhibitions, an alternative arts organization that's still struggling, financially speaking, to build a foundation under the dilapidated building it was given last year? It's simple: Those who don't have much to lose might as well gamble big.

          No Name definitely has a winner with Room, a rare show of local artists joined by something other than the foundation who gave them a grant. Curators Patricia Briggs and Diane Mullin (who also recently organized the Through the Body exhibition at the Weisman), together with No Name Exhibitions curator Christi Atkinson, invited dozens of artists to walk through the Factory and select a room or space to work with: stairwells, closets, offices, sections of the factory floor, the courtyard, and so on. It's difficult to generalize about so many individual artworks, but the success of many of them seems to stem rather directly from their chosen site--its physical peculiarities, history and materials, as well as other, more indefinable qualities--as opposed to those installations in which space is used as a figurative pedestal, or merely a literal room, for the art.

          In "Untitled (The Return)," for example, it seems as if the earth has erupted into a roughly 20-square foot section of the Factory's floor--a small act of nature's ongoing reclamation of the man-made. In actuality, it's Mara Pelecis's consummate piece of trompe l'oeil trickery, one that incorporates a big pile of dirt, various plantings of roots, mosses, and ivy, and floorboards that were scrupulously matched, weathered, and warped by the artist. Considering the general condition of the building and No Name's ongoing mission to rescue it from ruin, "The Return" makes an especially poignant statement.

          While Pelecis has responded directly to the physical site, Bruce Tapola's installation (pictured here) is more an outgrowth of the exhibit itself. Seeing as how Room is as extensive as any museum show, he has provided an amenity no museum can do without--a gift shop--which is perfectly situated in what was the Factory's kitchen, a somewhat secluded spot with its own street entrance. "Botticelli's Love Castle and Gift Shop" is a kitschy, obnoxious, low-rent version of your average bourgeois art boutique, with a floor that rips off Mondrian and murals on the fluorescent pink walls that are seemingly lifted from t-shirts (a monster truck) and thrift store paintings (a sad-eyed boy with a poodle). Tapola and various colleagues (Frank Gaard, Melba Price, David Dunlap, and Stuart Mead among them) have stocked the shop with "real" art as well as posters, t-shirts, chapbooks, lightswitch covers, and other tsotskes--genuine "artist-made product," and all of it pretty reasonably priced. The brilliant thing about the "Love Castle" is how Tapola makes you laugh at his socio-cultural comment on the insidious coupling of art and commerce, even as you're being implicated in it: Having dutifully made the rounds of the rest of Room, you are tempted to whip out the checkbook and take home some cultural consumables. Stripping art of its preciousness, yet also highlighting its vulnerability as a sheer commodity, "Love Castle" is alternately playful and caustic; it's one work that ideally would become a permanent Factory fixture.

          Another hit is Rollin Marquette's untitled work, affectionately referred to as "the cheese chubs" piece. A structure the general size and shape of a telephone booth is covered in chicken wire, into whose holes are squished chubs--i.e., diminutive plastic tubes of pasteurized cheese product (standing inside, you're embraced by the fragrance emanating from a few that have popped). Leading out from each chub is a nylon cord, groups of which are carefully arranged together like strands of cornrowed hair, then wrapped around various armatures surrounding the structure. Any messages or symbolism in the cheese chubs are for the viewer to divine; I prefer to think of it as an almost purely visual piece (with a bit of scent for effect)--a well-crafted combination of geometric logic, whimsy, and obsession.

          In what could be called the East Wing
of the Factory are two of Lily Tsong's "Four Accumulations," a low tech/high concept
take on, as she noted in her proposal, "poverty/excess, want/luxury." One is a long, thin triangle of gold paint that flows across the room and partway up the wall, a filling-in of the negative space created by a light cast on Tsong herself, standing with her legs spread. Splayed over a pair of nearby chairs is the "Comfort Machine," a vaguely octopus-like creature sewn from black fake fur with its tentacles winding down to the floor. In her notes, Tsong makes reference to a baby sling, but I found this piece more akin to an only quasi-cuddly--and actually sort of menacing--stuffed animal. In the other room is an accumulation of "days of unwashed dishes," curving out from the wall in a crescent shape: an excess of food consumption, or want of some household help?