Feature Articles

October Issue 2000

The North Carolina Museum of Art Presents Interiors, Contemporary Works, Many By The State's Artists, Explore Physical, Mental, Spiritual Space

Sneak a glimpse through a series of open doorways. Ponder the view from the front seat of a '56 Chevy Bel Air. Explore the comfortable elegance of a Cape May summer residence or the stark barracks of a Polish concentration camp. Pay a visit to a miniature two-story home or to a full-sized structure built of charred and treated lumber, set on a hillock and surrounded by marigolds.

Through Dec. 3 the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, NC, presents Interiors, an exhibition of works by 12 artists, ranging from painting and photography to sculpture and installations ­ all exploring the notion of the interior.

Interiors features 32 works by 12 artists, including paintings, photographs, prints, sculpture and installations both indoors and out. Several NC artists are represented, including Stephen Aubuchon of Raleigh, Donald Furst of Wilmington, Jeffrey W. Goll of Durham, Alex Harris of Durham, Page H. Laughlin of Winston-Salem, Andrea Mai Lekberg of Durham, Elizabeth Matheson of Hillsborough and Brad Thomas of Davidson. The other artists are Cheryl Goldsleger of Athens, Ga.; Marc Leuthold of Potsdam, N.Y.; Craig Pleasants of Amherst, Va.; and Shellburne Thurber of Boston, Mass.

"The interior as a genre has a noble, centuries-old tradition in the history of art," said Huston Paschal, exhibition curator and the Museum's associate curator of modern art. "This show will demonstrate that contemporary art has much to contribute to this long-standing tradition."

Selected works explore the different kinds of space ­ physical, mental, spiritual ­ represented in both real and imagined interiors. The exhibition recognizes a room's variable potential by exploring such diverse interiors as Shellburne Thurber's photographs of abandoned houses, Cheryl Goldsleger's paintings of visionary spaces, Marc Leuthold's carved ceramic sculptures, or even Jeffrey W. Goll's hard-shell gourds, whose insides contain dioramas viewed through an old camera lens.

"The theme of interiors lends itself particularly well to installations, and the show will include one work inside and one out," said Paschal. "The indoor installation, by Brad Thomas of Charlotte, is a tilted room designed in forced perspective ­ inspired by the Museum's 15th-century German painting of Saint Jerome in his study. Viewers will be free to explore the space, whose floor, walls and ceiling will be papered in pages from books."

"The outdoor work is by High Point native Craig Pleasants, who now lives in Amherst, Va. This installation will be a two-story tower constructed from charred and treated lumber and steel-pipe railing and prominently sited on the Museum's grounds."

Works featured in the show also include: Stephen Aubuchon's photographs of a Polish concentration camp; Donald Furst's prints of pathways, thresholds and labyrinths; Alex Harris' photographs of the interiors of vintage cars; Page H. Laughlin's paintings of plush living rooms; Andrea Mai Lekberg's wardrobe storing garments of another era; and Elizabeth Matheson's photographs of private residences. Several of these artists have NC connections.

Litho Industries is sponsoring the exhibition. Accompanying the exhibition is an illustrated catalogue featuring an essay by Paschal.

For further information check our NC Institutional Gallery listings or call museum at 919/839-6262 or on the web at (www.ncartmuseum.org).

Interiors
by Huston Paschal

"[Note. Taken from the Interiors catalogue, this essay by Huston Paschal, associate curator of modern art, captures the essence of the exhibition. The complete catalogue featuring images from the exhibition is available for sale in the Museum Shop.]"

The interior in the history of art? One likely thinks first of the ordered, golden living spaces painted by de Hooch and Vermeer; then perhaps of the brooding, vaulted prison fantasies and crumbling ruins etched by Piranesi. Hogarth and Vuillard, Hopper and Lichtenstein-a few names suggest how, spanning centuries and countries, the genre has been hospitable to richly diverse treatment. And in the last quarter of the twentieth century, with the proliferation of installation art, the interior has been as often realized in three dimensions as depicted in two, in general, however, manifestations of the genre share this characteristic with those sublime seventeenth-century Dutch interiors: the closed-in space yields a portrait of a style of life, a mind-set, an outlook.

This exhibition explores contemporary formulations of interiors. The show's twelve artists give expression to interiors both real and imaginary; they conjure spaces physical, mental, and spiritual. As different as their conceptions are, they for the most part focus on the space itself with inhabitants implied rather than present. The viewer becomes the occupant-and a participant in defining the particular sense of enclosure represented. Each interior becomes, to borrow Henry James's phrase for the human mind, "a chamber of consciousness," furnished with pure potential, a place of dread and dream.

Like the seventeenth-century Dutch interiors, Page H. Laughlin's paintings owe their genesis to prosperous times. These lavishly painted canvases of plush living rooms are inspired by mass-media images promulgating the latest trend in tasteful decor. Laughlin's heavily worked surfaces-brushed, scraped, rollered, and squeegeed-completely transform these spaces. The opulent scene in, for example, the Museum's Untitled (Mirror, Mirror) seems on the verge of dissolving-a process adroitly arrested by the composition's stabilizing symmetry. Bathed in a burnishing light, the decomposing luxury is shown to have a dark side. The blurring technique, masterfully handled, discloses the painter's own ambivalence. Itself an object of many-layered beauty, a Laughlin painting exposes the shallowness of consumer culture while simultaneously acknowledging its allure.

Coming at contemporary life from a different angle, Craig Pleasants builds Shaker austerities into his sculptures and houselike installations. A longtime advocate of innovative alternative housing for the marginalized, Pleasants finds building materials in the thrown-away and the otherwise-intended. At some remove from the glossy extravagances of the so-called shelter magazines, a Pleasants structure answers a human's basic need of shelter in a basic way. Expressed in a lean vocabulary, a Pleasants installation is a bare-bones, sometimes droll concoction with meaning compressed, poetically.

Pleasants's concern for the homeless is mirrored by Shellburne Thurber's reflections on the weakening of community epitomized by an abandoned residence. Thurber's handsome color photographs grant abject houses a stateliness at odds with their present condition. Deserted interiors are inhabited now only by evidence of neglect and decay. But Thurber finds fugitive secrets there.

If Laughlin's interiors rethink the relationship between objects and their owners, Thurber's appraise the emotional residue after the owners have departed and the objects are no more. Thurber evaluates the psychology of the space; she brings to light-and honors-its evanescent memories. This series ponders the stubborn fact of impermanence in the context of life and cycles of change.

The houses photographed in singing color by Elizabeth Matheson are occupied-and cherished. In a New Jersey summer residence, for instance, everything is spruce. The Cape May house, more than a century old, has benefited from its owners' affectionate respect for the comforting haven they find there. A lightly worn elegance and a gaiety permeate these living quarters where the self-sufficiency of the moment expands into long-term satisfactions. The yearning for continuity Thurber documents is fulfilled-in an atmosphere created over generations where relatives and revelations have flourished. Evoking the human presence even when no one is about, the uncluttered close-ups are elliptical; they suggest more than they explain. And always, a wise and humane wit (those vacant hangers gossiping among themselves, that flirty bit of red tablecloth glimpsed on a hotel balcony) nurtures the old-fashioned virtues and old-fashioned pleasures on quiet display here

The car interiors Alex Harris shot-with his camera set up in the cars' back seats-also represent immaculate, private getaways. The heightened depth of field achieved in these color photographs allows two equally crisp views, the cushioned, constricted one inside the car and the expansive one seen out the window. Stories unfold. In one car, the dashboard rises in convex curves at left and right that, like a pair of hooded eyes, blankly regard the classically pedimented building across the street. The sleek Bel Air convertible, its top down, will blithely leave behind the roofless remains of the once-grand hotel. Harris found these aging American automobiles on the streets of Havana and used them to make a series of lighthearted, bilingual double-portraits: the personal refuge as well as the cityscape framed by a foreign windshield. Each car also delightfully reveals its owner's unabashed sense of self.

Entering the small-scale, two-story Jeannette's House designed and built by Andrea Mai Lekberg conveys the viewer into a different dominion. Lekberg fabricated this beguiling fantasy as a shrine to the artists who have influenced her and as a laboratory for herself, to maximize the lessons learned from those modern masters. Eager to get depth into her paintings, Lekberg turned to a painter who was also a sculptor, Henri Matisse. His two-foot-tall sculpture Jeannette (specifically, the third in his series) spoke to Lekberg as no other sculpture had, and she made a copy of it, not quite five inches high. Heeding a child's shrewd disregard for scale, Lekberg then made a home for her Jeannette, ample enough for nineteen other tiny versions of works by artists such as Picasso, Dufy, Feininger, and Calder. The replicas in each room determine its mood and furnishings, most of which Lekberg made (e.g., the needlepointed rugs, the beaded chandelier). This winsome environment is a place where art matters. Jeannette's House is a case study in the creative process.

Opening the wardrobe doors of Lekberg's Interior of My Dream transports the viewer deeper into a visionary world. Purity is the presiding precept in this miniature model. The wardrobe's tone-and tonalities-are hushed; the mood, reserved. The white wardrobe holds an 1870s, subdued silk dress and its obligatory layers of undergarments. Exquisite, the work is also endowed with a valuable ambiguity. The very spareness of the armoire, the utter simplicity of its chair and mirror leave room for the mind to wander. And the period ensemble helps remove one from the here and now.

Lekberg's tiny stitches thread together a complex weave of present, past, and above all might-have-been. She draws viewers into a dreamscape shaped by the fragility of hope, contoured by a future caught in the past.

Life is but a dream-all too frangible. Visiting the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz, Birkenau, and Majdanek thrust photographer Stephen Aubuchon into the nightmare of the Holocaust. A series of disturbingly beautiful gelatin silver prints records the presence in the absence he found there. Aubuchon took the images from the prisoner's perspective, putting the viewer in the barracks and in a bunk. (One of the three selections on view is a close-up so extreme it throws off perception of scale; it reads as an abstraction. The viewer is actually looking into the corner of a cramped bunk built into a wall.) Although the barracks are clean and empty now, the sanitizing cannot dislodge the ghost of the past. The bunks haunt as pictures, not of sleep, but of death. The windows, outlining an unreachable freedom in a little patch of sky, are light-filled. It is the light, symbolizing liberation through death, that has a cleansing effect.

Jeffrey W. Goll probes conflicts in society and within the self in his puckish Gourd Archive. Goll exploits a gourd's resemblance to a head, using the plant's inside for a diorama viewed through a lens inserted in its shell. (The lens makes even goofier the connection with the head, which is the ultimate interior, housing that unruly workplace, the brain.)

In Genghis Kahn Dictionary Loop, one of four selections from The Gourd Archive on view, Goll reassembles dictionary pages to suggest how the narrative of history is often cut and pasted to suit the narrator's prejudices. The altered pages, their entries now devoted to legendary leader-warriors and inset with grainy images of soldiers, rotate on a cylinder-a literal cycling of the violence that this narrator feels summarizes world history. Other dioramas examine codes of behavior and belief. Numb enactment of daily ritual, for instance, is reviewed in A Belladonna Existence.

Goll's darkly cynical, lightly whimsical peep shows usually center around a diminutive book made or remade by this painter and sculptor. Like the gourds, a book is a repository, a magical archive (and an interior of a sort). Eye to lens or book in hand, the beholder enters into a thrilling-and tricky-pact with the contents, subject to interpretation. What Goll warns against is the unthinking acceptance of any ideology. He collages scraps of text, often cryptic inquiries into the nature of faith, onto the pages of his charming, cunning volumes-their decorous language is inflected with wisecracking bite. Goll is not ridiculing believers; instead he plays devil's advocate. Recognizing the need for creed and custom, he cannot resist pointing out their misuse.

Donald Furst harbors no such skepticism. Furst's considered opinion is that faith is a gift from God. A color etching gently espousing this belief portrays a spiritual journey-a series of thresholds waiting to be crossed. Furst envisions not a personal quest but one directed by a divine force. The artist's fascination with labyrinthine space is evident in other prints by him in this exhibition. His tondo encircles a complicated layout-steps and arched passageways, sunny courtyard and half-lit interiors. A third print, a balanced arrangement of interlocking triangles and rectangles, is composed of bare, nondescript rooms which are inscribed with eloquently nuanced shadows. The artist leaves the air undisturbed-and the choice of which pathway to pursue open.

Brad Thomas clearly indicates the entrance to his installation, The Study. But once inside his dubious temple to learning, visitors can freely investigate a distorted space containing a child's school desk and lexicon. Thomas, a lover of books and libraries, was inspired by the Museum's fifteenth-century painting of another bibliophile, St. Jerome (shown in a study whose floor, by the way, also appears to be tilted). With this earlier time in mind, Thomas casts a wary eve on the future. Books risk being replaced by computer files; knowledge, by information-a microchip-engineered diminishment commented on here subversively. Thomas has implanted a monitor in the primer and transmogrified the scholar's venerable book-lined study into this skewed room papered with encyclopedia pages. (Visitors who consult the book will find-instead of pages-a screen showing a surveillance video of themselves puzzling over this curious volume. This unexpected component gives the installation's title a double meaning: room and experiment. Thomas turns the observer into the observed, enhancing self-awareness in humorous and unsettling ways.) The Study cleverly elucidates a technocultural predicament: the student, glutted with information, remains hungry for knowledge. Will the pupil become the person Emily Dickinson described, someone who "has the facts, but not the phosphorescence of learning"?

Cheryl Goldsleger shares Thomas's reverence for libraries-and his ability to use perspective expressionistically. With the idea of a grand public archive in mind, Goldsleger dreamed up the soaring space in Collection, one of three paintings by her in this show. She renders the vast atrium overlooked by floors of library stacks in three different views (linear perspective, isometric projection, and floor plan), layered one upon the other. Goldsleger constructs a continuous space that is perceptual as well as conceptual. The conceptual predominates in Resonate. This darkly radiant maze also reads on multiple levels. Its floor-plan flatness is elaborated by concentric circles which represent a three-dimensional space determined by stairs and stories. Flights of steps divide Resonate into quadrants. (Stairs heighten spatial interest, a device Goldsleger exploits in the Museum's Colonnade which is also included here.) Each circle demarcates a distinct floor, pushing this enthralling architectural invention (edifice or enclave?) deep into space.

The concept of the interior proves malleable, finding dramatic expression in the ceramic sculptures of Marc Leuthold. His medium, clay, has an ancient association with the utilitarian vessel, one of the oldest space-enclosing forms. Nonfunctional, Leuthold's "vessels" are extravagantly articulated inside and out. Hemisphere 276, with a multilayered interior of ever-diminishing circles, intriguingly complements Goldsleger's Resonate. The deep-cut fluting of the roseate top layer swirls around a figure-eight opening whose edges are embroidered in a gossamer honeycomb pattern. From double to single aperture, the eye is ingeniously led down, through a white stratum, to a conical form in the innermost recesses of this seamless complexity. The intricate carving embellishing all the various layers resembles the pleated silk of a Fortuny gown, the clay improbably partaking of the fabric's fluidity as well as its light-catching qualities. The hemisphere and its companion in this show, White Cone, hold the eye and mind through a sequence of deepening responses.

This exhibition only begins to suggest the myriad forms an interior may take. Though small, the show practices a healthy latitudinarianism in applying the term, yet all of the works delineate spaces that invite meditation. For whatever its physical profile, an interior's greatest potency derives from its value as a metaphor for psychic space, the locus of introspection. The paradox of the interior is that it encloses one's life and expands it. As the objects in this exhibition demonstrate with provocative and penetrating means, a mind can reconfigure a limited space in numberless ways.

Introspection gains from solitude, and the value of solitude also rests in paradox. In the propitious climate of solitude, one can pay concerned attention to the world. Counterpointing innocence and knowingness, one can cultivate a sense of wonder. In a state of total receptivity the imagination can be alive to the transformation of perception that art privileges. Technology, irrevocably, has redefined the human environment. Endlessly cascading through this humming digital domain, a person requires a private station whose coordinates are stillness and silence. These magnitudes make room for the creation of a secure and spacious inner realm, a self-enlarging universe containing nothing but possibilities.

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