O’Flaherty’s, Houses and Hotels, Donna Dennis
On view : March 9 - April 28, 2024
To my surprise this opening was not seething with people as per usual of O’Flaherty’s, the evening's unsavory weather and downpour to blame. Yet the absence of a bustling crowd complemented the show, allowing room for undisturbed contemplation.
A solemn series of houses fit for midgets emerge from the darkness. A two story townhouse seemingly plopped out of the life of a 1950’s American atomic family. A cabin-like structure with mosquito netting. Light inside. They do not indulge in any frivolous details or ornamentation, reading as almost ascetic. No artifacts pointing to them being lived in. They do not exude warmth - a sentiment usually tethered to one’s abode. Hotel Pacifica is a deconstructed west coast motel where interiors and exteriors are re-assembled as one, white wooden garden trellises, daylight leaking outside from the horizontal blinds. Haphazardly flung together furniture inside of Tourist Cabin with Folded Bed, as if abandoned. Buzzing green static emanating from a “NO VACANCY” sign. Upon turning a corner, down a dimly lit corridor a culminating surprise awaits - Cataract Cabin, a house perched upon a large boulder, a small boat posted on it’s side. It engulfs the small room completely, you have to crane your neck to look up at it.
A puzzle piece of architectural elements where associations of the past drift forward, eliciting tinkerings of nostalgia and contemplation snowballing into rumination as to where we’ve been and why. The structures have a haunting quality, reminiscent of a film set or a theme park. A visual representation of a memory upon remembering - certain features are forgotten and erased yet the ambience is preserved and recreated, ephemeral blurs of past spaces manifested without their former characters. Profoundly American architectural silhouettes, slips and scatterings of suburbia. The bite-sized scale one imbues them with an endearing quality, reminiscent of children’s playhouses. Yet the sentiment evoked by the bleak bare bones dressing conjures a tension in processing these semiotically opposing elements.
The work has a rugged charm in it’s vacilating quality, in how malleable it’s symbology is, creating an omnipresent relevancy that can withstand time - if you’re someone up for mental fetishization. The theatrical hierarchical grandiosity on offer in the final room feels belittling and confrontational. The ideologies surrounding “home” and “house” have always been nebulous and subjective, yet in the current time the work speaks to a growing dissonance. A general air of transience permeates the collective. The concept of home/house is an ever-changing rubik’s cube, in which creating an alignment often feels out of reach. The last image of stability, a quite caricatured one, may indeed be inspired by Americana of the past decades. Rent hikes, war torn countries, immigrants and emigres, remote working.The structures suggestive of houses are cold, abandoned - reflecting the discombobulated relationship to housing. Yet their insistive presence reflects an ever-present yearning for home. The title of the show Houses and Hotels links a seemingly permanent structure with a transient one, in the show their lines become blurred as they often do in real life, in a way threading the needle of their interwoven nature highlighting the structures in which our ephemerality is played out.