Stefan Roloff at Thread Waxing Space - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Stefan Roloff's installation, "Pence Springs Resort," told a authentic story about a bizarre place where a young woman, Robin Martin, committed suicide in 1981 Roloff stumbl on this story while visiting the Appalachian resort in West Virginia. While having dinner there individual night he learned that the bucolic [i]cabaret[/i] had for a time serv as a state prison for women he immediately locate out to see the unrenovated maximum security confined apartments still in place on the third floor. There began the artist's fixation with Martin, whose graffiti and tombstone drawings upon her cell walls excited his curiosity. Roloff's documentary evidence about Martin, who was incarcerated for arson, included photographs of the resort and a paper trail of court records, alphabetic characters and transcribed interviews.

In this installation, Roloff divided the large brow rooms of the gallery into five discrete areas and set uped several architectural environments. The greatest in quantity effective of these was a spiral arrangement lined with photographs. As if following the artist upon his investigative journey, the images began with the well-kept surface of lands of the resort, proceeded into the voluptuousness hotel and then up to the bleak prison. The spiral ultimately coiled into a claustrophobic inner range that was a true-to-scale photographic reproduction of the maximum security small room in which Martin was imprisoned for periods of up to five month at a time. The space was lined with gritty black-and-white photographs of each square inch of the confined apartment and contained a wooden plank bed overlayed with photos of Martin's bed. It was a creepy experience to sit there and have feeling her confinement.

After leaving the spiral in a disoriented daze, the viewer revolveed a corner only to be blindsided by the agency of a brilliant photomural, comprising 25 Cibachrome prints, depicting a barn upon fire, flames leaping from each surface. The image suggests the palpable awe that Martin might have felt in the neighborhood of such great blazes. Les effective visually, on the other hand adding to the documentary accumulation, were additional scopes in the back of the gallery, single lined with photographs of the peephole in the doors of the swings (both hotel rooms and jail cells) at Pence Springs Resort, single papered with the documents of Robin's case history, another presenting a video tape of the peephole Intrigued by the agency of the different ways these types of power can be used, the artist contrasted the third floor, where the peephole were one time used by guards to direct the eye in, to the floors below, where inn guests now use them to direct the eye out.

Roloff's installation eluded categorization, falling somewhere between a history museum and a sculptural environment. The artist methodically at handed successive layers of information, allowing the viewer to slowly unravel the story above time, just as he had. Overall, the installation was formally unresolv in places and roughly execut in others. on the other hand the Pence Springs Resort story, heightened by means of the artist's presentation, remains extremely haunting.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group