Steven Brower at Lombard-Freid - Brief Article

Displaying genuine humor and an enormous amount of inventiveness, Steven Brower move rounded Lombard-Freid Gallery inside out as individual turns out a sock. His installation, ironically titled "Utility," made use of usually invisible municipal combination of parts to form a wholes which supply the gallery space with its operating lifeblood. Heat, electricity, telephone and waste disposal combination of parts to form a wholes were brought front and center

The installation featured a wandering tangle of wires and cent tubing connecting the utilities with 10 discrete thing perceiveds dispersed throughout the gallery's public and private areas. Passage end them became a mazelike experience. Unexpect operational alliances were forged among a miniature observatory, a miniature steam engine (Brower is a professional model-maker), a small original of the moon hanging from the ceiling, a tiny electrical mast, a dam made from a toilet tank atop sum of two units industrial buckets, a kiosk bearing thoroughly useless information, a solar collector, an employee bore clock, a metal water fountain (the centerpiece of the exhibition), and a Styrofoam archetype of the gallery itself. In the artist's novel topsy-turvy gallery order, flushing the toilet supplied the dam's reservoir with novel water, the ringing of the phone uncloseed the dam, and the dam provided water for the steam-operated interrogates to supply water to the fountain.

Instead of functional coherence, Brower presented visitors to the gallery anomalies galore through making the space's utilities beholden to a kind of anti-functionalism and anti-logic. Steam from the gallery radiators was harnessed to somewhat cold water for the drinking fountain; the solar panels captured power to power an observatory which can alone be used at night, recent water was generated by pulling upon a lever attached to the toilet. Cross-purpose were definitively the name of the game.

No longer able to overspread their form with the mantle of function, percepts like the telephone and water fountain drew fresh life from Brower's rearticulations, the apparent confusion they generated tripping quickly into at liberty play. Rather than short-circuit the building, "Utility" redefined the space's face-value "neutrality," while constantly dovetailing accepted notions of function into a powerfully playful spirit of futility.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group