MattressFactory

Yumi Kori Kanata

Luca Buvoli Instant Before Incident (Marinetti’s Drive 1908)

Mark Garry Being Here

Mary Temple Untitled

Sarah Oppenheimer 610-3356

Yayoi Kusama Infinity Dots Mirrored Room

One of our favourites, a wall painting made to look like a very subtle shadow. You could hardly notice it, and most people didn't until we were putting our shoes back on from the Yayoi Kusama installation and happened to look up...

James Turrell Catso, Red

Jacob and Jessica Ciocci

Gretchen Skogerson, Switch

Brody Condon Judgement Modification

Bill Woodrow Ship of Fools: Discovery of Time

A trip to the Mattress Factory, (where else?) Pittsburgh

This gallery is situated in amongst some crazy ghetto neighbourhood called the Mexican War Streets on the North Side and is converted out of a proper house so it has what they call 'room sized environments'...

Which made it a really nice gallery to peruse at your leisure. Smaller rooms and no scary gallery attendees/guard dogs either. The show was also called Inner and Outer Space which fit in nicely with the 'environment' idea as each artist sought to explore this idea of inside/outside space in each room. The exhibition flowed well from each artist too. And I found the most successful artists were the ones who really embraced the idea of the room like environment, as opposed to the artists who just set up work inside the space...

The main building had a great Turrell floor. Most of the stuff in this building also revolved around having to enter strange pitch black rooms. We also frequently forgot to read the maps which told us where to walk in these rooms without hurting ourselves, which made for an interesting 'wall-feely-stumble-in-dark' situation...

Our favourite though, would have to be Sarah Oppenheimer's piece where she created a chute which allowed you to look out into the neighbour's yard. Funnily enough, when we viewed the house from ground level, they had mega fencing and crazy lockage to keep people out. Interesting voyeuristic tension.

Some of Carolyn's tutors, Jacob and Jessica Ciocci, were also a part of an exhibition in a separate part of the Mattress factory (it was split into two different houses in the neighbourhood). Was a crazy mish mash installation of 80s video game technology, mix tapes, plushies and video work. I particularly took to the video from the TV on the floor which had a soundtrack with it as well. Hypnotic goodness!

Today we also saw the Yes Men exhibition at CMU, look out for it in next post...

- Agnes