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Interiors/Exteriors at OMA
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Florida artists and designers mixed it up at the Orlando Museum of Art Thursday night for Interiors/Exteriors, a First Thursdays event. After the artwork was juried in, interior designers created vignettes with borrowed furniture and accessories, placing the artwork in these vignettes. While a spark of genius was evident, there also seemed to be unresolved tension between much of the art and the interior pieces chosen for the vignettes.
The high art of creating a vignette is intended to bring one's attention to fine art, and embed it in an appropriate context of influences. For a good example of this, see Japan Craze, a vignette currently on display at the Morse Museum.
And at least one vignette here actually does make the grade. Combining Pantelis Klonaris' riotous "Falling in Love" with Joshua Pearson's beautiful bench was a good move; they hang together well and complement each other. Pearson's bench, which undulates in an interpretation of a 1940's Herman Miller classic, goes nicely with the flat, colorful, mural-style narrative piece of Klonaris. Both have contemporary twists on romantic influences; Klonaris with innocent, romantic notions of love (are the fish a Freudian reference?); Pearson with the soft, textural bench begging to be caressed.
The rest of the exhibit, regrettably, was hit and miss. Brant's pointillist women were thoughtful, captivating, and very much of the twenties; yet crowded, salon-style, in between macho carved-wood mirrors, they seemed flat. M. Scott Morgan's famous mannequins made an appearance at a comically staged bed replete with suggestive bedposts, and a few pieces here and there sparkled. Throughout the show, large dark animal figures of welded wire strands loomed, at odds with the displays, lending a tense energy to the room. Museum sized pieces, these felt out of scale in between awful blue chairs and tiny oval tables. One would probably have been enough.
And, an egregious late-capitalism vignette glittered like a Las Vegas hotel room near the front door: a bemirrored screen and table, with shiny silk throw pillows on dull gray sofas with silver threaded fabric, a kind of mixed sixties pink-and-purple concoction in which the art of Julia Owens and others lurked. Here, the artwork almost triumphed over the furniture by being so alien to it; the grandmotherly yellow chair almost prudishly turned away from the garish display, and the trumpet vine watercolor refused to participate in the vignette at all.
Perhaps in this Great Recession, the jumble of interior design styles all in one room seemed more like an estate sale for a foreclosed McMansion. Perhaps the museum lighting, unforgivable to artwork, also changed the furniture and accessories once they were placed on display. In any case, where the vignette enhanced the art, and showed it within its context of influences, the show was successful. Interiors/Exteriors is a good exercise for First Thursdays and attracted a lively, engaged crowd, and will be a terrific showcase for local talent in years to come.
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