Beverly Semmes & Ingrid Schaffner April 6, 2008

Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?
testsite 08.2~
Beverly Semmes and Ingrid Schaffner

Opening Gathering: Sunday, April 6 from 4:00-6:00 pm

This exhibition takes its name from a 1956 collage by the British artist Richard Hamilton. Staged as cross between a domestic interior and showroom, the picture constructs a space crammed with Modernist furniture and an over-abundance of appliances. (Hanging over the TV, a comic book picture framed next to an ancestral portrait stakes this work’s historic claim as an icon of Pop art). The title came up, at first humorously in conversation with Beverly Semmes about how we might approach the opportunity testsite presents: for a curator (me) to invite an artist (her) to collaborate on a project with some site specificity inasmuch as it is largely located in a living room. Our subsequent decision to make eponymous Hamilton’s Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing? immediately provided a useful set of correspondences upon which to build, and now enter, this installation. Starting with collage.

Official Website: http://www.fluentcollab.org/testsite/