Project Space

Exhibition dates: 12/5/07--12/31/07

Interiors  brings together five contemporary artists based in the UK and USA, all of whom utilize specific interior aesthetics and materials that provoke a reconsideration of the familiar and the everyday. Each artist uses manifestations of a physical interior to conjure and activate emotions and specific states of mind within the viewer, yet their choice of materials and modes of execution re-integrates the work into our daily experience. Thus, each refrains from creating a purely contemplative approach to the subject.

Featuring work by Dennis Oppenheim, Rebecca E. Chamberlain, Henry Krokatsis, Debbie Lawson and Nathaniel Rackowe, each artist explores differing devices that strike at the viewers emotional core. While Chamberlain and Krokatsis look to recognisable modernist styles, Lawson draws on the possibilities of domestic fantasy. Conversely, in Oppenheim's seminal Factory (1979-82) series of drawings we find the interior self-examined through the industrial and the mechanical. Rackowe expands this aesthetic vernacular in his striking sculptures that strip the interior down to its bare construction materials, rendering functionality impotent and allowing the gaze to realize the simple material beauty.

Debbie Lawson approaches notions of the household interior through her beautiful marquetry panels. Utilising fragments taken from doors as her base and into which she carves whimsical imaginary scenes, Lawson transforms the mundane with her depictions of couples in blissful sexual abandon or wolves making tracks across the wood grain. Indeed, pieces such as housewife's choice I, II, III, IV (2007) evoke ennui of the domestic: a place of quiet dramas where the routine of life exists alongside the dreams and desires of their inhabitants. 

Rebbeca E. Chamberlain focuses on depictions of 1930s modernist office interiors. The work crackles with constraint and repression, reflected in titles such as I repress my Anger to save you (2006). Using ink emptied from Biro pens and working on antique vellum paper, she depicts cool, cinematic, unpopulated interiors that provoke questions about the creation of architectural and interior stylistic ideals and their part in an aspirational lifestyle. Her use of ink in this manner creates a tactile glossy finish which sets them apart from traditional ink drawings, re-casting them as domestic objects such as screens or blinds.

The inclusion of drawings from Dennis Oppenheim's Factory series (1979-80) jolts the viewer out of the comfort of the purely domestic confronting them with a fantastical aesthetic amalgamation of industrial production and the architectural blue print. This seminal series of works engages with the idea of creative processes and workings of the artistic mind. Taking the symbols and language of the machine and factory technology, Oppenheim suggests that "machines are a rather perfect device to use as a metaphor for thinking". This use of an industrial mechanical lexicon is used to externalize and represent an interior thought process. Through the drawings resemblance to actual architectural drawings the viewer is lead to believe these spaces exist. In fact these creations are imaginary blueprints representing the creation of personal internal worlds and spaces within imagination. As the domestic is re-imagined in terms of human emotions and nostalgia, in these drawings Oppenheim injects emotions into the machine.

In Krokatsis' installation Mirrors (2007), the guise of the domestic interior is inescapably entwined with a sense of nostalgia. Old mirrors are jumbled together creating a jigsaw formation, which is in turn doubled or mirrored with blank painted replicas. The use of materials such as formica and melanine, materials readily associated with 1960s ideals of pristine domesticity possess comforting associations. However, their state of dishevelment and decay within the installation renders them unsettling and questions our readiness to retreat into nostalgia.

Nathaniel Rackowe's work also quotes the industrial and mechanic while simultaneously referring to the domestic. In his examination of the meeting points of the domestic and the industrial, he uses generic construction materials and light, stripping interiors back to their basic components and opening up a space for phenomenological experimentation. In Sliced door four (2007) the quotidian portal is rendered unusable -- sliced into four, with light emitted from the center. The viewer approaches the object with familiarity to the bare material and scale, however, the transformation of the door strips it of its functionality and familiarity is disallowed. The viewer, as with all the works in the exhibition, oscillates between familiarity and disassociation, allowing them to re-envisage the interior through the artists intervention.  

In conjunction with this exhibition, imoderni also presents a special site-specific film projection of 'fast films' by recent British art graduate Harvey Somerfield. Each evening the outside garden will feature the projected films. Somerfield fascinated with cinema and the physicality of the filmstrip makes these films by videoing sections of 35mm filmstrip running at high speed taking original cinema adverts, trailers and feature films as his source. These 'fast films' transform the exterior space into a flood of color and movement, they are also available to be viewed on screens during the day for the duration of the exhibition.

imoderni llc is aMiami based marketing, sales and customer service agent for many of Italy's finest modern furniture, textile & object manufacturers. imoderni represents them in relationships with dealers, end-user customers, the trade, for contract and to the media. The imoderni collection of manufacturers is available through fine dealers and showrooms in the United States and Canada.

Dedicated to expanding modernism by integrating the visual world of art with furniture & object design, the new Project Space has a permanent place in imodernis showroom in the Wynwood Art Gallery district in Miami . In addition to curated exhibitions, the showroom will also feature a permanent lifestyle presentation of furniture and objects, manufacturer's exhibits and new products, and conceptual room & project development.

imoderni's showroom was designed by Architect Franco Bianchi.

Rachael Lawe was specially invited by imoderni to curate the Project Space for the inaugural exhibition. She is a graduate of the Courtauld Institute of Art and is currently director of FRED a contemporary art gallery based in London.