from pacific coast to no coast

Entering the gallery feels as though you are intruding on someone’s spring-cleaning event. Seemingly unrelated objects are placed through out the room in organized piles: the tower of lawn chairs, the stack of clock radios, totem pole of empty, painted 12-pack of Lenienkugel’s Original long neck bottles, and the television on its side on top of the cinderblocks with the potted vine on the television. Each clock radio is blaring a different station from country music to talk radio to rock music to static. All the stations are FM, which is associated with leisure time. On of the stations is public radio, but because the other stations are all music station the talk is much harder to focus on and is therefore drowned out by the music. The absent listener is disengaged in politics and other matters of the public sphere. The varying times on the twelve clocks, none of which are correct, prove further the listener’s disengagement from reality and space outside of home. The bottom most clock is counting the seconds and the 7^th clock is blinking 12:00.

The overall garage sale feel is achieved by the three plywood pieces that cover the three windows in the gallery and musky smell of the gallery. The three plywood window covers have opaque shinny black paint covering most of the bare wood surface. The paint has organic boarders and no visible brush strokes. It looks as though the paint was poured onto the plywood while it was lying flat on the ground. Each of the three pieces is identical with the exception that the paint boundaries vary in the way the paint spread out. The black pools are sad and devoid of any context. They are empty. The series reinforces the paint pools as intentional. They are hung up like paintings, but the medium and canvas can be found in different aisles of Home Depot. The plywood serves a dual purpose both practical and aesthetic. However, the plywood’s cheap quality almost disqualifies it as aesthetic. The windows are boarded up, which further personalizes the space. If no one can see in, you are perfectly alone in the room. However, it is self-isolation like the isolation of the individual from the greater community. Like the radios, the person who put up the boards is drowning out the public sphere.

The first piece the gallery visitor encounters is also segregates the resident from society as a whole. The base of the piece is a doormat with a brick patter and 6 rocks leading up to the TV from smallest to largest. The doormat is welcoming, dirty and well worn. Real bricks are stacked in front of the cinderblock that the TV is place on its side on top of. The TV is identical to the 20-year-old one your father refused to throw out because “It still works damn it!” and “I got that before I met your mother.” However, it does not really work because it can’t work the cable and even the basic channels are fuzzy. On the screen is a black and white image of white dots emerging from total blackness, then streaming like shooting stars towards each other and fading back into blackness. On top of the TV is a potted vine in a shallow terracotta pot on a white china plate. The plant is real. The vine is growing such that is trails down the side on the TV without obscuring the image on the screen. The plant is alive which connects the piece to the present and real. The vine cannot live forever, which makes the piece temporary. Behind the TV is a door-like freestanding board. The board is painted entirely black and then has thick drip-lines of the same black paint. There is a visible circle that has been painted over on the left side of the door where a doorknob should be. On the back of the door there is an identical circle, however, it is white with a black ring painted on the outer most part. The board/door appears to be melting into black tar. The doormat welcomes the visitor, but the door clearly advises the visitor to stay away.

Hung on the wall is thick plywood framed in a black frame covered in glass. On the plywood are old stickers for cars, gas stations, auto parts. The stickers look like they are from the 1950’s or 1960’s. The framing with glass gives the piece a definite end. It is finished. The pastime of collecting stickers has ceased. The action is dead and now it can only be appreciated passively through viewing. Random chunks of the plywood are missing. They have been removed by a handsaw. It seems to have been found in the garage while cleaning it out. The owner framed it for sentimental reasons, which is why it has an unfinished quality.

Despite the isolationist feel of the plywood boards, radios and TV, there are several pieces that have a communal, but still deeply private, feel. The seven 12-packs of Lenienkugel’s Original are painted, from bottom to top, black, dark gray, light gray, thick white, thin, but still opaque white, white, and translucent white. This obelisk is in front of the three gallery windows and is surrounded by five small tree stumps spray-painted black on the sides, as if some kids vandalized them, arranged in an half circle.  The tree stumps suggest a community gathering place and the boxes a religious icon or memorial. The vandalism of the stumps make them less attractive and disinclines the passerby to make use of the place. Thus, the communal space remains empty.

Next to this piece is a pile of plain wood sticks constructed in the shape of a bonfire pile. About a third of each stick is wrapped in wide black tape. The campfire is the most ancient place of gathering, but the sticks in this fire setup are not sticks found in the forest. These sticks are cut and purchased from a store. They do not have indexical sign of a natural stick. This is an abstract, untraceable fire. Only the wood and structure alludes to a fire, otherwise it would just be a pile of stick-like forms. It makes the fire cold: the exactly antithesis of a real fire.

Across the room, in a wood frame and covered with glass is heavy, textured black paper. In the far right there are two cut outs roughly a square inch each. Inset of the cutouts are two graphics. In the top on is the print of a roller brush used for painting walls. On the roller there are 3 stars and 3 strips. The outlines are manila colored and the background is black. The other is the Sherwin-Williams Paint logo “Cover the Earth” with manila background, black outlines, and the plaint is red. The use of house paint themes extrapolates to the whole show, which uses black house paint in almost every piece. The small size of the graphics compared to the large size on the frame denotes their evident insignificance, but large influence because the tiny logos are the only thing the view focuses on.

Next to this is the apparent source of all the black house paint in the gallery. On the floor is a closed generic pale of black house paint. There is black paint dried to the side of the container that has dripped from inside when the paint was used. There are also smudges of white and gray paint which match the shades of gray in the beer box totem and the canvas propped up on the pale against the wall. The canvas is six vertical strips varying in gradients of black. The strips are equal is width and from left to right is go 60% gray, 30% gray, white, 30% gray, 60% gray, and black. This clean, unframed canvas illustrates that the house paint can make a refined work of art in the classical sense. The gradients of gray, which have defined boundaries, reflect both uncertainty and definite categories in society, which have spilled into the domestic sphere.

In the middle of the gallery is a black rectangular box. The box is made out of plywood and is open on one end. Only the outside is painted black, which has been absorbed into the grain of the wood. Inside the box, the supports and unpainted wood is visible. The box is empty. The box can be a crate, a table, a bench, or perhaps a coffin. The table and bench are the communal uses. The crate and coffin are the individual uses. All the other pieces in the gallery encircle this piece and allude to the death of a communal society. All the objects interrelate to drive human kind to its ultimate demise, but it is not too late. There is still a way out. One side is still open.

In the small side room, separated by a black curtain, there is a black and white video playing on loop. It is a man wearing a suite while digging a hole in his backyard. A house with classic wood siding painted white is in the background. There is a stereo playing a women singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow while crying with piano accompaniment. The video is flashing as though there was a strobe light in the room. The sound of the audio and the look of the man and house in the video give a 1950’s feel. The connection between the video and the audio make it seem as though the man in the video is digging a grave for a pet that the woman is crying about while singing. This connected to the black box in the middle of the adjoining room reconfirms the box as a coffin. Perhaps the objects in the coffin room belong to the man and the woman.

The use of various gradient of black reflects the gray areas of both the public and domestic spheres. The grays are the uncertainty of how to act and what is expected. The stacks of objects command attention and power. They signify the power of authority in society. The perilous structure of the green and white lawn chairs, which are balanced on one another without any reinforcing structure or binding, points out the vulnerably of society. The chairs were once used in leisure time presumably on the front lawn where the user was visible to the public sphere. The 12-pack stack is also dependent on gravity to remain standing. However, the box structure makes that stack more stable. It is a comment on how beer is a lasting pastime, but outdoor front lawn neighbor (public) interaction is not.

All the found objects in the show appear to be old and dating to the 1950’s. This is the age of 2.5 kids, the homemaker, suburbia and the lost of identity in the crowd. The myths of the 1950’s are still used today as the ideal for home life. The discontinuity of objects in the show poke holes in this ideal. Everything is cold and empty.

The whole show is poetic. It disassociates the viewer from his or her own personal experience with familiar objects. The use of the black in every piece makes each piece self-refer to the show. None of the objects where expecting the artist and none of the pieces are expecting the viewer. The intensely personal feeling of the space and the exclusion of the viewer are the result of the poetic nature of Lyons’ art. The pieces are loud, but the meaning is subtly quiet.

Slow Dance backinblackisblackisblackisblackisback is eerie to quote the ThreeWalls press release. It demonstrates the lack on engagement in current society by individuals who give in to the driving force of mainstream culture. The disembededment of worn and cheap domestic objects leaves an unsettling feeling in the viewer, which never quite goes away. Lyons’ show is powerful and a must see. I thoroughly enjoyed the hour and a half I spent in the small, empty, but loud gallery. There is an artist talk March 20, 2008 at 7:00 pm at ThreeWalls. (119 N. Peroria, Chicago, IL 60607) The show goes down March 29, 2008. See the ThreeWall’s website at http://www.three-walls.org/ for further details.