John Giglio’s BlowHomes at the Aldrich in Ridgefield, CT
On my way to the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, CT for John Giglio’s exhibit, “The Main Street Sculpture Project: BlowHomes,” I was eager to see how the artist had transformed the historic houses into what he described as “BlowHomes.”
Giglio is known for his sculpture and performance art, and his exploration of the relationship between self and community. The BlowHomes continue with these themes of space, structure and existence, reinventing historic monuments into inflatable sculptures. The sculptures are made of heavy-duty vinyl fabric, filled with air, and easily taken down – deviating greatly from their older predecessors of wood and slate. I would say that the new, synthetic materials that the sculptures are made from render them more permanent, except that one of the homes was vandalized around Halloween last October, and had to be removed from the exhibit.
Victorian homes turned into soft sculptures, John Giglio
The sculptures were really great, seeming to pop out of the seams and moorings as you looked at them. The Victorian homes’ transformation into the BlowHomes was perhaps more subtle than I had expected, as the soft sculptures bore a very strong resemblance to the real thing, one even displaying the street name and number on the front. However, they were considerably smaller than the real homes, and all of the 90 degree angles had been softened, or “blown out.” See a few more images on my flickr site here, along with some images from Anselm Kiefer’s exhibit, also at the Aldrich.
The Aldrich Contemporary Museum of Art is located in Ridgefield, CT, about one hour north of Manhattan. Free shuttles are being provided from surrounding train stations to patrons this summer; to find out more about this service, click here. The Aldrich’s Home website is here.
-Caitlin is an Artblog intern.
