HOUSE WORKS

Dark House kite - G. Peters

HOUSE WORKS 

at the Western Colorado Center for the Arts

Grand Junction Art Center

December 6th 2013 - January 27th, 2014

This exhibition is a collection of photos, sculptures and installations of Melanie Walker and George Peters exploring the varied themes of the house and the idea of home.

Exhibition Statement:

The house is a nest, a place of retreat, a collection of life memories, a shelter from storms, sometimes a prison made to escape from, a place to return to. It is our societal glue, placing ourselves into a community of other houses in suburbs, cities and village communities. Our house mortgages hold us there. Our families grow up there.

                                                                                                    

Our roots to place are also our house foundations. It was not so long ago that our inherent nomadic wanderings took us to places that we could plant and harvest. We stayed and built houses of stone, sticks, mud and straw from the earth we tilled. Our houses shaped us. They formed our protective exoskeleton cocoon and grew with us through  our evolution to city dwellers. Even our technology connections return us to our “home” page.

Part of what brought us together as an artist team was our similar artistic sensibilities. We both have done works in installation, sculpture and photography using the theme of the house. The house is a strong image of our place in the world. We have even been influenced by our sleep dreams of houses as totems and as mazes of endless rooms and corridors. The house has slipped into our psyche and made a place of its own for us to wander in and explore. We’re using this exhibition to extend our understanding of the place our houses have in our lives.

Melanie Walker's works include her photography featuring her 'Househead' series. 

"The Househeads came to me in a dream. They came at a time when I was searching for a sense of place. As a single woman I was trying to determine what home was without family. They became my fictional family. Home is an idea that we carry in our heads.

The Househeads first appeared in my work as constructed images done through a Polaroid Materials Grant. They evolved into installations, puppets and other permutations. At one point,  I found a box of negatives at a yard sale. I made prints and re-photographed all of them with houses on the heads. Friends saw them and began bringing me their family pictures to include so they could be a part of my fictional family. This has been an ongoing project that I return to over the last 20 years"

The Puppet - M. Walker

The Sleeper - M. Walker

The Architects - M. Walker

Baggage - M. Walker

Marriage - M. Walker

OMPHALOS is an installation series of view houses by Melanie Walker with windows to peek into the interiors. Each scene is revealed through motion sensor lighting and sound effects transporting the viewers into miniature rooms.

 Curtain Lights - M. Walker

Test Tube Babies - M. Walker

Ancestor House  - M. Walker



Hatching House - M. Walker

Radio Room - M. Walker

LAND ESCAPES are a series of works using the house in relation to the land that is it's foundation. They appear as islands of influence set adrift in time and place.

Pine Beetle - M. Walker

Desert Shack - G. Peters

Green House - G. Peters

Shack - G. Peters

Winter Tree House - G. Peters

HOUSE FLY KITES - The following kite forms are made using a dye sublimation photographic printing process on polyester and framed for flying in very light winds. 

Brick House Kite - G. Peters

Cuckoo Clock kite - M. Walker

Stone House  kite - M. Walker

House Hand Moth  kite - G. Peters

Cloud Tower kite - M. Walker

House Fly kites & Painted houses

The painted houses are acrylic on wood of our homeward imaginations. They are follys and pattern plays for making a shelf size city scape. We have been making these works for the last two years for ourselves and our friends. This is  our first exhibition of these small houses. 

Painted Houses

Bird House - G. Peters

House of the Moon - G. Peter

The screen house installation is a memory of the Colorado Front Range flood which damaged many homes and lives during October of 2013. The screen material used causes moire' patterns that shimmer as the viewer passes by.

High Water - installation by G. Peters & M. Walker

Mobile Homes & Plato's Aviary - installation sculptures

The combined installations of Mobile Homes and Plato's Aviary set on the stage area of the gallery is a collage of birds, windows, picket fences, house forms, tornadoes and walking houses. Plato wrote  of a recollection of a discourse in which Socrates states an analogy on the nature of knowledge. It compared the process of thought to the act of grabbing at flocks of birds in a cage. A person at the center reaches out to the wild movement inside the cage and doesn't know or can't control what he may catch.  The grasping is like hunting for true knowledge. One might catch a dove or a crow or nothing in the flurry of flight.

Plato's Aviary - M. Walker & G. Peters

HOUSE WORKS  - opening night



More images from the HOUSE WORKS  exhibition  can be seen on our Flikr site as well as images from our slide lecture 

Launch Pad 002: LAND

We recently were included in a group exhibition entitled "LAND". Over forty artists participated and developed works of art, performance pieces and time based projects for the one day event on June 22nd, 2013. 

The works were situated in the picturesque setting of the Colorado landscape of the Wittemeyer Ranch just west of Boulder in the foothills. The curators of the exhibit were Petra Sertic from the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art and Denver artist, Alvin Gregorio. Artists were chosen to engage this particular region of Colorado in it's historical and/or current context through works  of art in a variety of mediums, including large scale site-specific installations, time-based art, and experimental projects. 

Our contributions were four entry way projects. At the Wittemeyer Ranch gates were a welcoming cluster of white flags along the roadway welcoming the out-of-doors gallery hikers. At the beginning of the trail entering the area of the exhibition were series of spinning mirrored Mylar ribbons along with broken 'glass' strands and reflective aluminum. As wind caught the kinetic sculpture, light reflections danced on the ground and flashed up the trees as people walked under the forest light show.  

Tree Talk - by George Peters

my work table for "Tree Talk"

I entitled this piece "Tree Talk". Through a series of science experiments in the eighties involving detectors placed in forest areas it was discovered that trees emit certain chemical signals into the air warning other trees of insect or parasitic invasions and thus triggering changes in the tree's natural defense systems. The strung lines of forms refer to these aerial streams of conversations between the trees. 

Melanie's piece, entitled "At the Edge of Memory - Drawn with the Wind" featured a group of drawings on cardboard tree stump tables. Pens, pencils and charcoal drawing instruments danced over the paper suspended by paper flagged strings strung from the tree branches creating individual time tracings from the wind and tree branch movements.

Drawn with the Wind - by Melanie Walker

We also created an additional installation the day of the set up using plastic Christmas ornamental lawn deer. "Deer 'n the Headlights" features four plastic deer each with light bulb 'horns'. The deer were donated by our neighbor, Brad, after I spotted the deer in a pile in his open garage. "Hey, Brad... Can I borrow those?" Brad replied "Sure George... but under one condition... that you do NOT bring them back!". The deer now guard our west side of the house property drawing amused glances by passers by. 

Here is a small sampling of other artist's works from the Launch Pad 002: LAND exhibition....

Alvin Gregorio's son, Koko did a fruit juice stand at the trail head
that was much appreciated by the exhibition hikers. 

Geode with Lichen Growth - by Donald Fodness

The Manifold People by Donald Fodness

Behold Nature - by Clay Hawkley
sited at the entry road to the exhibit

Roll With it by Amber Farnell - a statue of Michelanelo's "David"
dragged through the exhibit, down trails and along the road

Weight of a Pebble by A7
A trail with foot prints in the soil. An exhibition wall with
a photo of the artist's heel with stone attached... and the
stone displayed on a small platform.

This artist perched high on a stone outcrop made announcements
to the exhibition hikers below. He shouted into his bicycle mounted
megaphone, "HAVE YOU EVER FOUND YOURSELF... ON TOP
OF A CLIFF... AND WONDERED TO YOURSELF... SHOULD I
JUMP?...THAT IS ALL!"

Hearts of Oak by Ryan Elverson

An Impossible Task by Michael Bernhardt
the artist rolled the large construction up and down the 
mountainous terrain with great effort

Kokki-Do - by Sabine Aell and Norman Broomhall

Return by Niki Pike

Strangeness of Wonder and Existence
by Amber Britton

Fountain of Youth by Taylor Lawrence
a sunken 'well' with mirrored depths and electric lights

A telephone booth sound installation

Cave Painting by David Jared Paul
ink drawings appear as if by magic on the paper scrim
stretched in front of the mine shaft entrance

Seed Bomb Books - Take One... Scout for Opportunity...
Launch Seed Bomb

Drive-In Theater Series by Andrew Williams

Welcome - by Jason Garcia

Natural Photo Studio - by Richard Peterson

To see more of the LAND exhibition go to to the Flikr Slide Show. Click on the bottom center arrow on the image for the animated slide show.