I am posting this way too late for anyone to see either of the shows that Janeil Engelstad assembled and mounted at the threewalls gallery space and the Center for Book and Paper Arts at Columbia College during November. But due to the magic of digital media, you can still experience some of the content in cyberspace.
Engelstad built both shows on material she had developed for her website, Voices from the Center, which is a repository of oral histories she gathered while on Fulbright-supported stints in Bratislava, from Slovakians, Czechs and Hungarians — many of them architects and designers — about societal changes they associated with the fall of the Iron Curtain. Engelstad used quotes from some of the subjects in her part of the threewalls installation, which gave you a sense of the range of experiences, but you really should go to the website to see the fine photographic portraits she shot of the interviewees.
Engelstad asked a few young artists from the region to create works that responded to the materials on her website. While Magda Stanova, Miklos Suranyi and Matej Vakula created work specifically for this show, I was much more impressed with the Garage Project, which Tehnica Schweiz had already developed, and Engelstad arranged to include here. Schweiz had originally wanted to document how residents used the ubiquitous Soviet-built garage blocks in cities like Budapest, and exposed a rich culture all but unknown in the west. Next, Schweiz and collaborators began to stage tableaux that imagined what they would find if they could look behind any of the identical overhead doors, morphing it into a much more conceptual project. In the installation at threewalls, images from the project were projected at lifesize scale in a room whose dimensions were almost the same as one of the garages.
But the real reason to go to the show at threewalls was to see Oto Hudec’s installation, which riffed on a series of family photographs that documented trips his grandparents took during the 1960s and 70s in the former Yugoslavia in their much prized Skoda 1001. His fine watercolor drawings re-create images from the series of photographs and others in the family album.
The absolute center of the whole threewalls show, though, was Hudec’s full-scale balsa wood model of the Skoda. In a statement accompanying the artwork, he says the photographs were so familiar to him that he almost feels as if the trips were part of his own memory, even though they happened long before he was born. So the presence of the car, in three dimensions, makes a real statement about the centrality of the vehicle to Hudec’s family history. It’s also just a great object — a remarkable undertaking technically, and completely handmade.
I had one major problem with the presentation of the show at threewalls: although each artist’s name was placed somewhere in the vicinity of their work, there was no other explanatory information mounted. Although the gallery offered a binder at the front desk which contained written descriptions of each installation, these were not posted near the actual pieces. So unless you already knew the story behind Schweiz’s Garage Project, you really had no idea what the projected images were. At least Oto Hudec provided explanatory material in his own wall cards that really put his installation in context.
I was told that it’s simply threewalls normal practice not to post “didactic” materials — I guess it’s in the spirit of letting the work speak for itself. If so, I think it’s kind of pig-headed and overly rigid. While you might argue that really good art should stand on its own without an accompanying explanation, in cases like this, it couldn’t hurt. I think The Powers That Be at threewalls might ease up just a little.
