the #1 contemporary art network

002-queenland-la__art-091907-photo_joshuawhite

Gallery: Home

Michael Queenland: THE M.O.R.L. or NYC-Apartment

Laxart

2640 S. La Cienega, Los Angeles, CA 90034

September 15, 2007 - October 27, 2007

An apartment interior nonchalantly if eccentrically arranged, its unremarkable couches and tables arrayed here and there, Michael Queenland’s The MORL or NYC Apartment is not so much an installation as an uncanny reality unto itself.

Or rather it is a convincing architectural hybrid, the deadpan re-representation of a domestic space (replete with bric-a-brac, photos of beloved pets, bananas) within the conceptual envelope of a gallery space. Queenland has put domesticity itself on display here, constructing the familiar accoutrements of everyday life as plain artifice, and so proposing a theater of the real. Here, bric-a-brac becomes worthy of a ponderous gaze; every couch and table promises meaning. But that weighty intellectual premise (home as performance, the space of life as exhibition) in no way compromises the work’s accessibility. The very experience of traversing this strange, vacuous, unannounced apartment-as-art, of inhabiting and invading an artist’s production rather than ceremoniously viewing it, feels fresh—even provocative. And although The M.O.R.L.’s artificiality will be duly noted by every visitor, its ironic tone never at risk for being lost, there remains the rather singular feeling that someone is about to swing open the gallery door and come home.

(*Images, from top to bottom: Michael Queenland, The M.O.R.L. or NYC Apartment, September 15, 2007 - October 27, 2007, LAXART, The M.O.R.L. or NYC Apartment, mixed media installation, 2007, dimensions variable, Photo credit: Joshua White, Courtesy of the artist and LA><ART. Michael Queenland, The M.O.R.L. or NYC Apartment, September 15, 2007 - October 27, 2007, LAXART, The M.O.R.L. or NYC Apartment, mixed media installation, 2007, dimensions variable, Photo credit: Joshua White, Courtesy of the artist and LA><ART.)

Posted by Nico Machida on 10/6/07

comments
add comment

QUICK LINKS