THE NEW YORK TIMES
May 11, 2009
At a Clinic, Artists Reflecting on Home
There is little that is cozy about “HomeBase IV,” a site-specific installation built around a dozen artists’ notions of home. It is installed in a vacant medical clinic on the Lower East Side, unused for three years but still carrying the unmistakable whiff of an institution you don’t want to be in.
“When we arrived, it had nothing in it,” said Leor Grady, the curatorial and programming director of the project. “It smelled like a combination of mildew, chemicals, medical waste and sheet rock.” Even after a cleaning, the worn peachy-beige walls, industrial carpeting and fluorescent lighting retain a sterility that serves as a palette for the sometimes unsettling works.
The building, on East Broadway adjacent to the Bialystoker Home for the Aged, now has a dozen exam rooms filled with photos, videos, sculptural pieces and works of conceptual and performance art, many of which use materials found in the space. The free exhibition, the fourth in a series of installations called the HomeBase Project organized in conjunction with several cultural and community groups, continues through May 24.
The idea, said Anat Litwin, an artist and curator who founded HomeBase in 2006, was to allow a diverse array of artists to create and collaborate in and around a single space, and to engage the residents of a changing neighborhood. (Previous sites have been in Greenpoint, Brooklyn; SoHo; and Harlem.)
“The architecture and the setting, that’s what really inspires the entire process,” she said. The artists have three weeks to make use of the building and discuss their ideas over group dinners; there are also talks, readings and other events for the public, held, in this case, in what would normally be the center’s waiting room.
“When you arrive there today,” Ms. Litwin said, “it’s like entering a space that’s loaded, that has to do with caregiving or questions of healing. Also, there’s a sense of alienation in spaces like this. How do you create something intimate here?”
The artists were chosen as much for their background — many are immigrants — as their mediums, said Mr. Grady, who was born in Israel. Paul Sepuya, a Brooklyn photographer of Ugandan descent, hung portraits of friends and neighbors who had some association with Uganda, which he has never visited. “I thought it would be interesting to apply the idea of home as spatial,” he said. “When you’re not at home, it’s constructed by your family’s stories.” Similarly, Dafna Shalom took photos of men in the neighborhood who reminded her of her father — a hand here, a hairstyle there.
Other rooms are less about identity than community, or necessity. Sandra Lee, a sculptor and installation artist, paved her floor with asphalt but gave one wall a homey whitewash and a bright new baseboard, playing with the boundary between the public and private spheres. Marilyn Walter made her room into a drop-off point for supplies for the homeless. Letha Wilson used hacked-out drywall to create a replica of the Danish designer Poul Henningsen’s modernist Artichoke lamp.
Ms. Litwin’s piece — the project’s volunteer organizers, all artists, participated — includes images of her breath made on photo paper; developed without fixative chemicals, the images will eventually evaporate. “It’s breaking apart the idea of home into something that’s the most essential: How do you occupy space?” she said. “By this action that we all do unconsciously.”
Some artists more directly addressed the building’s history. Virgil Wong, whose work often deals with medicine and technology, installed realistic hospital posters and informational kiosks in the lobby. They promote a fictitious medical center — its Web site, rythospital.com, is disarmingly authentic — that specializes in male pregnancy (malepregnancy.com).
Abby Robinson, a photographer, perhaps went the furthest in merging home and hospital, even achieving a measure of comfort. Her work, “Home/Body Imaging,” is a combination of doctor’s office and photo studio. In a convincing waiting room complete with old People magazines and bad cartoons, “patients” fill out biographical questionnaires. (The boxes to check for “Do You Live at Home?” are Yes, No, Maybe, Sometimes, Rarely and Never.) Visitors are asked to name a favorite body part, then ushered through Ms. Robinson’s office, with its stacks of scrubs and jars of cotton balls, into a private room, where she takes a photo of the selected part. Though most people choose their hand, “they range from a young kid who was determined to show me his belly button” to an adult’s derriere, she said. “It’s — how do you want to tell us your history? Through your body.”
The photos — lips, eyes, rainbow-colored hair — are displayed like talismans in the waiting room, and Ms. Robinson also makes a laminated badge with the image for her patients to take home.
“It’s like a V.I.P. body part,” she said.
“HomeBase IV” is open noon to 8 p.m. Wednesday to Sunday, through May 24, at 232 East Broadway, at Clinton Street, Lower East Side; (646) 957-7165, homebaseproject.com.
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