Urban Bungalow 2014
Channel: Roots & Reasons StoryWorks
Date: 2018-01-06

Urban Bungalow features new work, one-of-a-kind objects, site-specific installations, and limited productions by Shawn Arlauckas, Joseph Corcoran, Art Drauglis, Yoshi Fujii, Sylvia Gottwald, Matthew Hyleck, Gretchen Klimoski, David Knopp, Tamara Laird, Laurel Lukaszewski, Peter Malinoski, Yoko Sekino-Bovè, Vicco von Voss, and Caleb Woodard. Furniture, glass, ceramics, textiles, jewelry, electric guitars, and skateboards handmade for the twenty-first century showcase diverse and individual approaches to working with both traditional and new materials.

In line with the art historical concept of a “total work of art,,” Lindsay thoughtfully selects works that seamlessly relate to, and engage viewers with the gallery’s contemporary architectural and design details. The collection intermixes lively, organic forms, with natural and richly decorative surfaces to echo the space’s biomorphic ceiling ‘clouds,’ undulating, mirrored mosaic, and cascades of handmade paper cranes. Elemental form language, freshly imagined and interpreted for our time by a new generation of artists, recalls the more radical movements in art and architecture – Arts and Crafts, Art Nouveau, Expressionism, Surrealism – and references the durable influence of global cultures and traditions that continue to shape American modernism and contemporary art and craft today.

Above all, the works in Urban Bungalow are extensions of the taste, skill, personality, aesthetic interests, questions and problems, and the humor and insight of the artists who make them. They work with various natural materials – reclaimed, repurposed and selected out of concern for the environment or for their historical or cultural significance. The artists use new or compound materials for their tensile strength and sculptural properties. Whether with wood grain, hot glass, wet clay, or even hand-built electronics layered to produce a custom sound, these artists work at the very limits of what is possible to achieve a synergy of form, function, and expressive power in each object on view.

Urban Bungalow challenges our assumptions about the art we use and live with and where and how it is made. It initiates us into the privilege of experiencing exceptional objects created by local artists whom we can also come to know. The art and functional objects – sensuous, sculptural, tactile, imaginative – are pleasurable to have, hold, use, and pass on to future generations; they promise to alter our quotidian routines into rituals we anticipate and savor, and to connect us to the continuum of human creativity.