histordomest-icity

Melissa Furness and Rian Kerrane: histordomest-icity

Center for the Arts Evergreen

31880 Rocky Village Drive, Evergreen, CO 80439

March 5–April 9, 2021

Admission: Free

Review by Laura I. Miller

In their new exhibition histordomest-icity at the Center for the Arts Evergreen, Melissa Furness and Rian Kerrane place an anthropological lens on domesticity, elevating the refuse of everyday life, and exposing its strangeness. The works in this exhibition, some collaborative and some singular, address the erasure of women throughout history and recast domesticity as a rich, sharp-edged tapestry that’s rife with artistic expression.

Melissa Furness and Rian Kerrane, Unheavy, 2014, painting (a dark place): oil on absorbent ground, stretched canvas; sphere with spikes (spiked mine): fabricated steel, bronze, motor; sphere (bathosphere): fabricated steel and bronze; 7 x 9 x 9 feet. Image courtesy of the artists.

Artists and professors of art at the University of Colorado Denver, Furness and Kerrane collaborated on nearly all of the works for this exhibition. With pieces such as Refuse and Unheavy, Furness created the paintings and Kerrane produced the metal sculptural elements, e.g. iron mop brushes and roses cast in bronze. The delicacy of the paintings and the rigidity of the metal contrast in a way that underscores the versatility of domesticity.

“We take aspects of our world and are reproducing them in two different ways and then are pairing them together,” Kerrane says.

Melissa Furness and Rian Kerrane, Refuse, 2016, floor painting with dishes/objects: oil on absorbent ground (unstretched and shaped), china, and ceramic dishes and figurines; metal mops: cast iron, plastic/metal/wood, 4 x 10 x 10 feet. Image courtesy of the artists.

Often, the collaborative works in the exhibition come across as playful with notes of magic. At first glance, Refuse looks like a scene from Disney’s Fantasia, with mops cleaning up a spill and no humans to control them. Upon closer inspection, it becomes clear that the mop brushes are cast in iron and seek to destroy the “mess,” which is in fact delicate china plates, cups, and figures, as well as a painting of Chinese takeout trash, on which they stand.

“I love the lowbrow in the gallery, and [the mops] being revered and critiqued in a different way because of the power of the gallery, because of the fresh view the viewer brings encountering something unexpected,” Kerrane says.

Furness came up with the idea to paint trash during an artist residency in China. Each day, she walked by a pile of trash that would shift and transform, and she came to think of it as a creature that expressed the lives of the people.

“I wanted it to be this beautiful painting, but also this thing that you throw out,” Furness says. “It’s a play on what we hold dear versus what we toss away.”

Melissa Furness and Rian Kerrane, Port of Gilded Proclivities, 2020, oil painting on canvas, cast and fabricated metal, and video, 12 x 12 x 8 feet. Image courtesy of the artists.

Additionally, works like Port of Gilded Proclivities play with mediums and challenge ideas about what a traditional canvas looks like. The trampoline in Port of Gilded Proclivities looks familiar but is in fact the canvas for a painting of vessels for water—chalices and teapots. A projection, which shows objects representing home and nostalgia flying through the air, accompanies the painting and brings movement and play to the ensemble.

A detail of Port of Gilded Proclivities. Image courtesy of Melissa Furness.

The newer works in this exhibition react more explicitly to the impact of COVID-19 on domesticity and historicity. In Thicket, the artists combine flowers from a funerary bouquet cast in bronze with Elizabethan face shields that have been painted with images of weeds and thickets.

“The flowers were from a death to COVID,” Kerrane explains. “Casting them is akin to making the fleeting more permanent.”

Originally worn to prevent women’s makeup from melting when they sat next to a fire, the face shields echo the masks worn now to protect us from the spread of COVID-19. The paintings of weeds and thickets cover the masks and represent the suffocating, uncontrollable nature of the disease.

“We’re constantly battling against this thing that continues to grow and thrive against our will,” says Furness.

The two singular works in this exhibition, Creeper and Flacid, by Furness and Kerrane respectively, offer a somber perspective on domesticity in our current times as well. Furness’s painting depicts a vase of overgrown and dying weeds and fruits against an ornately wallpapered background. Various beetles perch in the foliage and appear to scuttle across the canvas. The beetles create a sense of intrusion and infestation that’s so entangled with the scenery one can hardly imagine the still life without them.

Melissa Furness, Creeper, 2021, oil painting on canvas, 48 x 60 inches. Image courtesy of the artist.

Kerrane’s singular work Flacid, which features car tire inner tubes cast in iron, also responds to the global pandemic. The tubes and air valves represent “lungs and breathing,” while the flattened car tires, as broken agents for escape, represent “being lost in the pandemic era.”

Defamiliarizing the familiar recurs as a theme throughout the exhibition, whether through the artists’ experimentation with canvasses or incorporation of found objects. Tapestry is yet another example of Furness and Kerrane’s surreal domestic scenes. In this work, a quilt that is actually paintings stitched together and backed by moss sits atop a vintage ironing board, which also holds two cast-iron irons. A spiraling black cord extends from the iron to the ceiling, suggesting power from an unknown source.

Melissa Furness and Rian Kerrane, Tapestry, 2014, reconstructed quilt drawing (bhfreagra [puzzle]): water-soluble pencil and gouache on linen collaged onto canvas, oil paint above, backed with preserved moss sheeting and stitching; ironing board (board): found object; irons (iron iron): cast iron, rubber, and plastic; dimensions variable. Image courtesy of the artists.

For the quilt, Furness drew images of domestic life on pieces linen and planted the fabric in the ground for about 30 days. When she dug them out, they looked like 100-year-old artifacts, Furness says. She reconstructed the quilt from these remains, and the collaboration became a commentary on the life of the art object.

Likewise, Kerrane’s irons, which she says are electric irons recast in iron, take on a new identity in the work.

“Ironing boards feature in my work a lot,” says Kerrane. “The irons holding Melissa’s tapestry to an antique board are electric irons, weighted and rendered dysfunctional by their reproduction in cast metal. It’s a play on the word iron and how original irons are cast iron.”

Histordomest-icity immerses the viewer in familiar stories, but then the stories shift unpredictably, and the viewer must puzzle out the artists’ intentions and begin the process of building a new narrative. The exhibition offers a reinterpretation of the history of domesticity, encompassing the very real struggle between the powerful and the powerless and imbuing it with notes of wilderness and overgrowth, harmony and playfulness.

“In all our critiquing and what we’ve pulled together, there’s a sense of play and humor,” Kerrane says. “It’s there with how we configure things.”

Laura I. Miller is a Denver-based writer, editor, and arts supporter. Her reviews have appeared in Lit Hub, Electric Literature, Bustle, and elsewhere. She received an MFA in creative writing from the University of Arizona.