Open House: Domestic Thresholds by Heather Hart, Edra Soto, and Rodney Taylor at Albright-Knox Northland
by:
Dana Tyrrell
Published in May, 2020 in the early days of the Coronavirus Pandemic. Issue 3 of Cornelia was virtual only.
Heather Heart, Oracle of Conduction, 2019. Installation views of Open House: Domestic Thresholds by Heather Hart, Edra Soto, and Rodney Taylor. Photograph by Brenda Bieger.
When the Albright-Knox Art Gallery announced it would be closing at the end of November 2019 to embark on a multimillion-dollar expansion plan for its Elmwood Avenue campus, one of the principal concerns of the community became what, if anything, would fill the programmatic vacuum left by the region's largest museum. The answer arrived early this year in the form of Albright-Knox Northland, a new satellite facility deep in Buffalo’s East Side community.
Upon entering the Northland facility, you are struck by the newness of the space—the concrete floor and the arctic white of new gallery walls gleam amid the new amenities added to this elongated raw brick box of a space—despite the fact that pre-opening promotion of the Albright-Knox’s kunsthalle left little to the imagination. Guests were primed to experience Heather Hart’s Oracle of Conduction (2019) before ever seeing it in person through a wide-reaching social media campaign. Hart’s installation is an iteration on her signature house roofs, lopped off and laid for all to traverse like an angsty, adolescent John Water’s protagonist. Luckily there is significantly more real estate to cover throughout the exhibition.
Marking the two-year-long closure of the museum’s Elmwood Avenue campus and investiture in the Northland space, Open House: Domestic Thresholds is a captivating—if uneven—exhibition. It contains Heather Hart’s aforementioned Oracle of Conduction as well as work by Puerto Rican artist Edra Soto and the Buffalo-based Rodney Taylor. Acting as a parenthetical beginning and end on either side of Hart’s home, Taylor’s evocative paintings, although comparatively small in scale, loom largest of all the works, with the artist passing away at the age of fifty-three just one month shy of this exhibition’s opening. Open House: Domestic Thresholds had been conceived as a christening for the new space, but what it became is a memorial to the vision of one of Buffalo’s own.
Taylor’s paintings were inspired by houses surrounding the artist’s studio and home on Fillmore Avenue in the city of Buffalo. Each of them was created in the last two years with the vigor of an artist still challenged by his chosen medium, and their painterly quickness makes them feel like arrows loosed from the artist’s hands. Each painting is on paper and mounted to the wall underneath a sheet of plexiglass. Despite the pseudo-clinical presentation, the works alight. Base layers of metallic, greasy whites straight from the tube ground skeletal facsimiles of homes.
Taylor’s renderings of houses resemble what you might expect a child to sketch if asked to draw a home, but there is a severity, an urgency, and a hollowing-out of human presence that is far removed from child’s play. You imagine the fury that played through and across Taylor’s painted houses to leave them so skeletal, so desolate, and yet so fully alive and present before you. The houses in Taylor’s paintings shout, catch fire, and attempt to disappear without too many traces, but most importantly their archaeology signifies that something and someone was here.
Edra Soto’s Open 24 Hours (2018) sits behind Hart’s Oracle. Soto’s work here seems almost an afterthought; tucked away in the rear of the space, it only becomes visible as you crest Hart’s roof or walk around it.
Rodney Taylor, Home Series. Installation views of Open House: Domestic Thresholds by Heather Hart, Edra Soto, and Rodney Taylor. Photograph by Brenda Bieger.
Painted coral, seafoam, and white standing screens based on the rejas common in Puerto Rican homes visually divide the space and act as shelves displaying opaque forest-green and clear bottles discovered by the artist while engaged in what she refers to as "urban beachcombing." Appearing far too homogenous to be truly found objects, Soto’s work pokes at the bubble ensconcing constructed familial narratives, asking if what we see can really be taken for truth.
Heather Hart’s Oracle of Conduction (2019) occupies the largest physical space within Open House. Climbing onto the pitched roof, you hear the crunch of shingles underfoot and are lulled by the smell of roofing tar and freshly cut wood, two things that for me register with memories of summertime and outdoor labor. To interact with Hart’s Oracle is to be asked—and giddily to agree—to engage in both a physical and emotional climb. This work is not only a backdrop for selfies or the perfect social media post, it is a locus of activation and activity. To see families running across and around Oracle is to witness the activation of the home as a platonic ideal, something which everyone carries with them and a space everyone hopes to traverse unscathed.
Oracle also plays with the disintegration of public versus private space within the home. Underneath the highly visible, Instagram-able façade is a dimly lit undercroft running the length of the roof. There is little to see in this space apart from a wall of household mirrors and the skeletal structure of the roof; windows offer a glance outside the home and into the rest of the exhibition. This space points more directly than Edra Soto’s work toward the constructed-ness of homes and the narrative we buy into and agree on as part of the American Dream.
Home is a place to be haunted, where the certainty of memory never quite aligns with the present. We each carry an idea of home, and it is this idea we battle against when looking at artwork within this exhibition. Since I last saw Open House in order to write this review, I have gained a new understanding of my home. As I write this I’m rounding the corner on week three of social distancing as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. My home has become the singular backdrop of my existence, as well as a place of refuge and a micro-community of three humans, two dogs, and a bird. This place and the people in it, always a part of my daily routine, has become the locus of my life in a way that I could never have ever predicted, nor that this exhibition could have anticipated. Home became a verb. Home became real.
Edra Soto, Open 24 Hours, 2018. Installation views of Open House: Domestic Thresholds by Heather Hart, Edra Soto, and Rodney Taylor. Photograph by Brenda Bieger.
Cliff Parks Jr. is a concerned citizen, activist, and troublemaker. Parks writes primarily about music but is currently in the process of branching out.
