Interior of Design: Republic Gallery
Babak Golkar (03), Erica Stocking (04), Brandon Thiessen (98), Hadley Howes (98) and Maxwell Stephens (98), known as Hadley+Maxwell, are exhibiting in a group show entitled Interior of Design at Republic Gallery. Other artists exhibiting in the show include Hadley+Maxwell, Yedda Morrison, Natasha McHardy and Marina Roy, Samuel Roy-Bois and Nicole+Ryan.
Interior of Design re-arranges the margins between art object, furnishing and architecture as they collectively relate to the art-and the act-of interior design. Here, interior space and its contents are treated as still life, as a space of carefully considered collection and display, and a site for the safe consumption of rarified nature. The exhibition considers the specific return to interior space in art in the age of the condominium tower at the beginning of a new millennium.
As the dominant site for the display of art in our society, the space of the domestic interior-especially the space of the living room-has lived a double-life as semi-private art gallery. Interior of Design opens up a space to consider this latest phase in the collapse between the private interior and art gallery.
The exhibition considers the interior as not only spatial, but also "image-based." The artworks in this exhibition pay close attention to modes of presenting the ideals and dreams of the interior through new "interior" magazines, television programs, and Internet sites. The media of interior design may not be any more prominent than it was in the 19th century, but it has grown more sophisticated in the presentation of its "neomodern" self-image. Here the room, like the furniture, is sectional in its ability to be rearranged; like a walkthrough, it is as immersive and skeletal as a wireframe room; and like a collection of pictures, it acts as an archive of traces.
June 13 to August 2, 2008