Open Doors
AMLI Downtown
- Marie-Adele Moniot -
Open Doors installation view, AMLI Downtown
Late last summer, a group of resourceful young artists transformed an Austin home into a buzzing, vibrant and delightfully messy installation. They wrapped the house itself in bubble wrap. A man sat blindfolded in an open refrigerator, and turkey feet hung from the walls. This collective calls itself Open Doors—an apt title for recent art school graduates on their way to becoming working artists.
During the chaos of the South by Southwest Music Festival in March 2005, Open Doors mounted their second exhibition at AMLI Downtown, a temporary exhibition space on the ground floor of an unfinished loft and retail complex. Six artists filled the sprawling space with large-scale, site specific sculpture and installation work—a collection that would surely be homeless if it were dependent on a traditional gallery for exposure.
All six artists critiqued traditional methods of exhibition, but Sandra Martinez did so with unexpected grace and simplicity. By virtue of its size and arrangement, Object Rendered demanded a nontraditional exhibition venue; one can hardly picture the work in a small gallery environment. Martinez manipulated tires into surprising shapes that resembled crouching animals, shells or alien pods, and arranged them in ordered rows. Even with the use of harsh materials, which can easily be found in a garbage dump or a used car lot, the work achieved a lovely, balanced quietude.
Sandra Martinez,Object Rendered, 2005
Tires, twine, paint
Twenty-four parts, each approximately
2 x 2 x 2 feet
Photo: Hunter Cross
Equally eloquent was Cesar Alexander Villareal’s Nido—a massive nest of branches and feathers assembled in response to the birth of the artist’s first child. The viewer could bypass Nido’s jagged exterior through a small cutout on the side of the piece and enter a warm, feathered chamber where the sound of a woman’s voice singing a lullaby lent additional comfort and security. The most interesting element of this work, however, was its fierce shell. Its protruding, potentially dangerous armor could, quite possibly, represent the defense mechanisms of a new and overly protective parent.
Spatial relationships also figured prominently in Jacob Villanueva’s video installation You Are. On each of two obsessively neat vanities lay a comb, a hand mirror and a brush, each placed very precisely atop the other. This sparse, feminine staging was reconfigured by clever technological trickery. The mirrors were actually video screens carrying the image from in front of the neighboring vanity. In this simple gesture resided a deep truism of human behavior—the tendency to project one’s own feelings and insecurities onto other people, especially in close, familial or romantic relationships. The work was also a visual pun with the word “projection” operating on two levels.
Interestingly, when a viewer was not standing in front of one of Villanueva’s screens, it picked up Terra Goolsby’s Puella Pattern hanging on the opposite wall. The piece looked like a display case for biological specimens and emitted an eerie onscreen glow. On the wall, however, Goolsby’s work was a simple series of clear tubes injected with nail polish. They became curious, explosively colored specimens by their placement and casing.
Hunter Cross also experimented with a slightly clinical, almost scientific approach to display in Diaspora. Stacked acetate sheets were suspended in a cabinet from the ceiling; red, sticky dots arranged on each layer had an unusual effect as one peered at the work from below, creating the illusion of a three-dimensional relief map. Mundane office supplies became a precious topography that begged to be noticed as it reached down toward the viewer.
The flashiest work in this collection was Cole Thompson’s fantastic Gaspaglorbs—three enormous yellow weather balloons that maximized the space they were afforded. Each appeared like a cartoon mushroom, periodically inflated and deflated by a vacuum mechanism. As unapologetically languid as a hot day, Thompson’s constantly changing balloons mimicked the shape of the human body with all its lumps, bumps and imperfections.
Such flaws are, however, an asset to Open Doors. As a group, they managed to combine the wild, freestyle quality of their first show with a thorough and sophisticated conceptual model that read like a study in both biology and behavior—of the way we look at things. Each artist also explored how to use and manipulate space. This is almost unavoidable at AMLI, as the space is so enormous; it lacks the intransigence of a traditional art gallery.