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On Dec. 13th 2001 the Brook Dorsch Gallery
featured a home Installation by Miami artist David
Rohn. The project has been developed in the Dorsch
Gallery Crack House, an alternative space created
from a derelict bungalow that served drug addicts
before being rescued for art.
Based on the decorator model home,
the artist sees this contemporary marketing device
of the real estate industry, along with the proliferation
of home decorating TV shows and magazines as an important
symbol of contemporary life; if in many parts of the
country, you are what you drive, then perhaps to an
even greater degree now, you are where or how you
live. In a mobile consumer society one's home is an
important way of mirroring who we are, or would like
to be or to become. The idealized life as represented
in the idealized home may be based on an idea of luxury
or leisure. A conservative sense of tradition, or
a progressive modern look.
The installation is titled "Le
Chateau del Pueblo". It's intent is to
magnify the ways a populist art form like home decorating
represents self-expression, how contemporary social
values like narcism, vanity, and ambition find form
in Home decoration, and how the real estate industry
appeals to these kinds of values to market a product
that generally disdains the natural environment.
For this installation the artist has
created or altered, lamps, furniture and bric-a-brac,
as well as hand painted and block printed fabrics
and site-specific decorator art.
An architectural model of the crack
house along with architectural renderings of the project
are included as examples of the kind of artistic material
that normally defines and markets this type of project.
The artist has for some time been interested
in illustration, particularly types used to inform
dictionaries, encyclopedias, and textbooks as source
material for an art meant to mirror, if not examine
a kind of social worldview that (he believes) is so
much a part of our formative understandings of our
universe, that we take it largely for granted.
His examination of the idealized home
is a parallel effort to mirror a collective worldview
through our increasing use of our homes as a vehicle
of self-expression.
The installation of “Le
Chateau del Pueblo” was made possible
by generous contributions from blue, a design company
inc., Miami Beach FL. a grant from the ED Foundation
for the Arts, Kearny NJ. , and courtesy of the Kevin
Bruk Gallery, Miami, FL.
all rights reserved by artist © 2001-2003 -
David Rohn
The
Eyes Have It by Alfredo Triff, Miami New Times
Flush
with Queens by Nina Korman, Miami New Times
Medicine
Show art review from summer 2002
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