I didn’t take off my shoes when I saw the sand. It covers the floor of a long, narrowing hallway that ends in a pink/lavendar glow of light, in one of John Lightfoot Greiner’s installation at Flux Space. Down where the glowing is, a sharp left turn reveals a sofa projected on the wall, bouncing up and down. (I could swear the sofa was a generic orange-brown, the sort of color you see in some student living space, but my camera read it as pink!?)
I have no idea about the point of all this, but it made me laugh and offered a feeling of discovery and pleasure and the perfect seashore cabana on the beach. Unfortunately, like the summer, the exhibit’s time is over.
John Lightfoot Greiner’s doll-house size sofas in a box
The installation is one of four (or five, depending on how you count them) pieces that Greiner had installed at Flux. The others were also about furniture. Grids of multiple tiny sofas, multiple little wooden chairs with a cloth draped on each, a single webbed beach chair on a pedestal, also with a drape, and a single bench.
I do not get the obsession, but somehow enjoyed them all. The best was the first, however, with its long corridor to a place where the furniture has lost its function and become an image surfing invisible waves.
Greiner is one of the artists who now rents studio space at Art Making Machine Studios, which is part of the same complex as Flux. Joshua Kerner, one of the troika who created the place, said that Flux was going to try to bring in more artists from outside their own stable. (btw, two of the studios are now available).
Joshua Kerner holding one of the firearms he is carving from styrofoam insulation. Some are pink; some are blue.
While I was talking to Kerner, he mentioned he was preparing work for an exhibit in Seattle’s Friesen Gallery, a group show from his residency program at Pilchuck last fall. I asked if he was going to be doing more work in glass, but he said he was not planning to stay medium specific.
His current work for the show is hardly glass. It’s styrofoam insulation material. He’s carving fire arms in pink and in blue. They look great and almost not menacing–but not quite. He was unsure if they would be in a pile or would hang, pointed toward viewers. Naturally, I was thinking about the murder rate in Philadelphia and the death toll in Iraq, and elsewhere.
