"Factory Installed" Artist Kristine Marx

Kristine Marx on her piece EXPANDING MAGNETIC MOLTEN SYMMETRY:

I wanted to make a video that would surround the viewer. By entering the work, rather than watching the video from one point of view, the viewer experiences the piece from various perspectives. Different aspects of the environment are revealed over time.

The duration of each video is approximately 18 minutes. The shifting pattern of black and white transforms from straight to curved lines to circular forms, as if changing physical states. (The word molten in the title refers to the state of change from solid to liquid.) The imagery occasionally flickers or pops as it turns into another version of itself. It is ordered, and then random; symmetrical, then asymmetrical. The shapes suggest primordial, cosmic, and hallucinogenic forms. It’s about growth, awkwardness, unevenness, and sensuality.

The piece is based loosely on the musical form of the fugue. A unit of straight black and white lines was created as a Flash animation. This unit is repeated throughout the piece with variation. It develops from the quietness of a single straight line to the noise of densely overlapping organic forms.

The projected image and the plexi-glass structure are integrated with the architecture of the site. The usual visual clues that help us to navigate space dissolve in the complexity of the video projections. The coordinates of wall, ceiling, and floor are destabilized. What is normally still and flat appears moving: expanding, sliding, slanting, warping.

The work is influenced in part by Yayoi Kusama’s installations and how they blur the boundaries between the body and the environment. Immerged in the work, the viewer’s sense of physical space transforms into a psychological space. A subjective, sensual experience of the work offers a fluid, open-ended relationship between viewer, space, and image.

"Factory Installed" Artist Karyn Olivier

At first I assumed the site for the exhibition was the main Mattress Factory space. When I arrived and found out that it was in 1414 [Monterey Street] I had to shift gears. It was some sort of domestic space, maybe a bedroom. So I knew I couldn’t deny that history, and decided to deal with human presence and ideas around domesticity. After discovering the site and the general direction I needed the piece to go in, I walked around the city for two days. I was struck by the heaviness of Pittsburgh and the weight of its history and its physicality. It reminded me of a European city a little, maybe Berlin— a culture that is still forming, trying to find/re-define itself; holding onto its past with such pride but also recognizing its need to shift. The weight is really felt (and the irony of it)--- all of these hills and mountains with houses piled on top of each other. You look up and you see this layering of one on top of the other--the closeness and packed feeling, but also knowing that half of these houses are abandoned and vacant.

In terms of the materials I used, even though a chandelier may never have existed in a shopkeeper’s home, it signifies something that we can all understand. And though at the time this house was built chandeliers would have been powered by gaslights and not candles, I wanted to deal with nostalgia. It was important for the piece to be a living history. It was important for the history of that domestic space to be alive and really address/reflect the present moment. It’s critical for the candles to always be lit, so the viewer won’t get too stuck in the nostalgia of the piece and the melancholy that is there as well. I also wanted the piece to be a bit absurd- lit candles during the day (utterly useless and without function). It’s really about the viewer/participant being aware of their physicality and how they share that space with the two objects in the room (the lit chandelier and the flatness of the paint removed floor).

I hung the chandelier lower than they usually exist in rooms (and above dining tables). I was hoping that the removed paint below could act as surrogate for a table or a shadow. But I hope the viewer will feel the tension between the two objects because of their proximity to each other. Also, I hope one could imagine oneself actually physically fitting in between the two. Though I am at eye level with the chandelier, I still place myself (mentally) in the center of the sculpture with the two objects being the end notes/book ends.

It made sense [to add and subtract from the space] to address time and one’s relationship to it. I was also thinking of how the city is laid out. The rich owners of the factories living in amazing homes with the workers living so close by in houses right behind in the alleys. I like this conflating and was hoping to touch on that in the piece.

[When naming the piece] I was thinking a couple of things. Very literally, I am referring to the process of lifting the grey paint off the floor. But also, the sky in Pittsburgh; it seems so often to be grey and overcast. Also, I was trying to find a way to lighten the load for the city, remove some of the burden of its past as an industrial steel giant, of its status at one time of being a very prosperous city.



Come see Factory Installed at the Mattress Factory on view through July 9, 2006.

"In the Dwelling-House" in progress

Hello! I am honored to be the first artist to post to the new Mattress Factory Artists blog! I have been working with the MF on my project “In the Dwelling-House” for a while now and we are all excited to see it coming together in final form. Working with the support of the MF and the Heinz Foundation has been an amazing opportunity for me. There are so few opportunities for new artists to “do whatever you want” and this has truly been one of those opportunities for me.

My work-in-progress, “In the Dwelling-House” is a site-specific piece in the truest sense. It is inspired by the history, architecture, and heritage of Pittsburgh, in the broad sense, and, on a smaller scale, the now-forgotten lives of the people who lived at 516 Sampsonia on the North Side. History has a physical presence in Pittsburgh that ranges from the humble row houses of the north side, Bloomfield, and Lawrenceville to industrialist mansions and exquisite engineering of the bridges that connect the city across the three rivers. 516 Sampsonia was a working-class dwelling, yet there is elegance in the balance and symmetry of the façade, the detail of the cut slate tiles on the roof, the decorative gingerbread, etc. No doubt it is overly romantic to imagine that this elegance infused the lives of the hard-working people who inhabited the house. But the elegance of architectural detail, just like the cracking, peeling paint and the crumbling layers of wallpaper, gives clues to how we became who we are today.

In 2004 the Mattress Factory loaned me 516 Sampsonia for the installation “What Remains.” For this work, I filled the window openings with granite inserts engraved with common cemetery imagery and the names, ages, and occupations of residents of the house circa 1900. The information about the people was gathered from census data, and the information is elegant in its simplicity and the archaic sound of the occupations. The information tells a story, though the details of the story lie in the imagination of the viewer. The people and their lives become the “past you did not know you had” from the Calvino quote. When I moved to Pittsburgh in 2001, having only ever lived in the south, I certainly felt surrounded by a past I never knew I had. What Remains was my way of making a small, overlooked part of that past a bit more tangible.

For “In the Dwelling-House,” I am doing an archaeological investigation of sorts, sifting through the things that previous occupants of the house have left behind. I have gathered a variety of “artifacts” and gone through every room looking for clues in the peeling paint, layers of wallpaper, crumbling plaster, newspaper clippings, etc. I have gone through hundreds of times, sometimes with a flashlight, sometimes with a camera, sometimes on my knees, and I still see something new every time. There is a beauty in the decay and a certain poetry to the way that time and the elements have altered a space that served so long as a home. My goal with “In the Dwelling-House” is simply to highlight a few of the details of the space that I find fascinating as a way to entice the viewer to take their own journey through the time and the space that is 516 Sampsonia.

The work opens on April 29th. Come join us for the party and find out how jungles, boxing, great-white sharks, picnics, and abstract sculpture fit into the history of an ordinary Pittsburgh working-class dwelling-house…

More later,
Ruth Stanford

Coming Soon

Starting soon, Mattress Factory artist Ruth Stanford will write about her project In the Dwelling-House. This piece is an archeological look at an historic working-class home that provides a glimpse into the lives of generations of former residents. Visitors will walk through the home, located at 516 Sampsonia Way, and view Stanford’s careful excavation and presentation of what was left behind.

“The spaces we inhabit inevitably tell a story. The rooms of 516 Sampsonia are filled with information about people none of us know, and a time we never experienced. My interest is in what we may learn about ourselves from considering what they left behind.”
-Ruth Stanford

Through meticulous examination of the contents of the house, Stanford was able to uncover decades of history. She used the relics she discovered to create work that inspires visitors’ attention.

“On the first floor, in what once was a kitchen, I chose to re-create, in three dimensions, a colorful geometric pattern that appears in fragments on the ceiling. With the addition of the sculpture and the fresh wood floor, the room becomes a gallery highlighting small details of a wallpaper pattern likely chosen 70 years ago.”

Stanford’s work at 516 Sampsonia began in 2004 with What Remains (still on view). For this piece, she researched census data for the former residents, including: name, age and occupation. This information was then inscribed onto granite slabs that stand in the window frames looking out onto the street.

In the Dwelling-House is supported by the Creative Heights initiative of The Heinz Endowments. The Heinz Endowments support efforts to make southwestern Pennsylvania a premier place to live and work, a center of learning and educational excellence, and a home to diversity and inclusion. Committed to helping its region thrive as a whole community—economically, ecologically, educationally and culturally—the foundation works within Pennsylvania and elsewhere in the nation to develop solutions to challenges that are national and even international in scope. One of the largest and most innovative independent philanthropic foundations in the country, the Endowments awarded over $53 million in grants in 2004