This is WESA Arts, a weekly newsletter by Bill O'Driscoll providing in-depth reporting about the Pittsburgh area art scene. Sign up here to get it every Wednesday afternoon.
Late January is when the winter arts season really gets rolling, performances in particular. But the last days of this year’s seasonal lull are a good time to catch up with art exhibits at places like the North Side’s Mattress Factory, with its afternoon’s worth of installation art.
If you’ve ever looked at a circuit board and thought it resembled a miniature city, Akwasi Bediako Afrane’s “D2NA – TC24: Visions of the Past” is for you.
A dimly lit gallery holds, model-railroad style, a landscape made of old homeappliance and electronics parts, including about 10 flat-screen monitors. Don a VR headset and shrink to one-hundredth your size for a ride atop a tiny freight car. In contrast to the silver-and-matte-black palette of the unadorned gallery, the quick ride through the lit-up and blinking cityscape will make you feel like you’re in a scene from “Blade Runner” set at midnight.
The Ghanaian-born Akwasi also wants us to think about things like the disposability of the tools and toys of our digital age, and the environmental and human impact of extracting the minerals and fossil fuels it takes to create them. But “D2NA – TC24” is also, both pointedly and paradoxically, a lot of fun. (Even so, speaking from experience, I’ll insert a motion-sickness advisory here.)
Similarly playful — and incorporating its own model railroad — is Pittsburgh-based Isla Hansen’s “How to Get to Make Believe,” on the second floor of the museum’s 1414 Monterey annex. The multi-room installation, with the railroad breaking through the walls, incorporates puppets, miniature sets and video in an homage to “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” and the educational necessity of play.
To actually get to “Make Believe” you’ll first traverse “Deep, Deep Woods,” on the annex’s first floor. Catalina Schliebener Muñoz’s piece also explores childhood, but their inspiration is the work of Greer Lankton, the late trans artist whose work is on permanent display at the museum. “Deep, Deep Woods” reinterprets and recontextualizes things like picture books and children’s drawings to interrogate them; the centerpiece is a huge, prone set of Raggedy Ann legs sprawled across the gallery floor.
Two other installations at the museum delve into more literally shadowy terrain. Sudanese-Canadian artist Azza El Siddique fills the museum’s already foreboding basement gallery with “Echoes to Omega.” Visitors step onto a low metal grate and walk between two rows of large, cream-colored ceramic busts of a woman (inspired by an actual ancient Egyptian aristocrat so immortalized) set at floor level, with water dripping slowly on each head from a steel frame, slowly staining it rusty.
At the gallery’s far end, a large video screen to each side plays “The Two Truths,” an ominous text that reads as some sort of curse or prayer. “You cannot evade who are behind, who are in front,” it reads, in part. “I will destroy all that I have made, to the surging floods, as in its original state.” Here also is an empty pedestal; is it for you, the visitor? Hard not to think of Shelley’s classic poem “Ozymandias”: “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Back at the Annex, Pittsburgh-based Marvin Touré’s “the blood is the water” offers two rooms with black-painted floors and deep-red walls. Suspended metal pipes are wrapped, seemingly haphazardly, in tar-blackened twine, while orange gourds sit cracked open and coated inside with the same tar, which also pools glossily on the floor. The work suggests a public health emergency or an unnatural disaster (lead in the water? PFAS?) and puts an unnerving spin on the Annex’s adjacent permanent installation “Handrail,” with its demure trickle of (for now) clear water.
There’s even more at the museum, including Eugene Macki’s gallery-sized installation “Reification,” and Luke Stettner’s “State of the Sky.”
The latter is a house-sized show at 516 Sampsonia Way in which the Ohio-based Stettner and his collaborators use archival materials like news clippings and photos, and labor union political cartoons plus installation art and experimental film to explore how humans, industry and nature have interacted in Western Pennsylvania. “You are no safer than your most careless act,” reads a workplace banner in a black-and-white photo. It was originally meant for workers, but it’s a message factory owners really should have taken to heart too.
Indeed, “State of the Sky,” with its built-in darkroom and ever-evolving contents, might warrant a couple hours’ exploration all by itself. But unlike most of the Mattress Factory’s other exhibits, which close in the next few months, you’ve got time: “State of the Sky” remains up through next January’s seasonal lull.
