"Siege mentality: Plastic-clad, duct-taped 'Fortified Home' makes a striking exhibit at City Without Walls"

January 2005 by Dan Bischoff

In the middle of "Rural, Urban, & Otherwise" at City Without Walls gallery there is a clapboard playhouse, big enough for full-size people, with a flickering television inside, novelty lights in one window and a welcome mat incised with bluebirds. The entire house, from its peaked shingle roof to its bottom strip of vinyl siding, is surrounded in thick translucent plastic held in place with duct tape.

Margaret Roleke's "Fortified Home" is a riff on the Bush administration's panic-inducing anthrax response, which urged Americans to stock up on duct tape and plastic sheeting in case terrorists attempted a biological or gas attack in their neighborhood.

Roleke, who works in Redding, Conn., conceived of the piece as an outdoor sculpture, but the wrapped and alienated house has many meanings in our suburban world -- as fortress, sure, but also as specimen, even as cell.

This is the annual City Without Walls New Members Show, made up of work by 19 artists who joined the gallery's slide registry in 2004. All appeared in earlier Walls shows, and most make art out of the ambiguous shmear of city, suburbs and countryside (hence the title) of the Northeast. It's ambiguous because there is no longer a convincing definition for any of these locations, as city dwellers spread into the 'burbs and everywhere the landscape becomes more vestigial.

Sonoko Fagans of Montclair is here with three tiny paintings from his series "Bike Porn." "Bike Porn 7: Shimano Encounter (Red)," which depicts two bits of chrome biker gear locked into a shiny highlighted embrace. He is also showing even smaller (no bigger than a Yu-Gi-Oh card) pictures of wrist guards and a biker's Latex-sheathed tushie.

Scott Lewis of Forest Hills, N.Y, shows "Jessica and Sebastian," a brilliantly colored double portrait of imaginary suburban characters who "share a common obsession: the beauty of the common man or woman," executed in ink washes with a doodling intensity reminiscent of Max Ernst.

There are signs of doodle revival everywhere here, in densely worked parodies of dollar bills (by Lake Hiawatha artist Matthew Monica) and in New York City artist Kentaro Hiramatsu's acrylic realist paintings with their packed forms and strange squiggles of black paint based on the shape of the cloud bursting from the World Trade Center towers.

Vilja Virks-Lee's deadpan photos of Jersey people with their shotguns -- Virks-Lee lives in Loch Arbour -- show the gun owners indoors, where the big guns look less menacing than plumbing parts. Jason (Woei-Ping) Chen of Irvington, N.Y., takes photos of people he has met over the Internet, posing them in their homes, like the oddly mute-looking girl with red hair and pink fuzzy slippers who poses, arms at her sides, in the jaws of her bookshelves and home entertainment center.

There are still shadows of materials-based and process-oriented art in "Rural, Urban, & Otherwise." Steve Rossi of Brooklyn shows "Silver Circles (green)," nine Mylar balloons that imperceptibly leak their gas into the gallery space, each topped by a similarly sized wafer of steel or beeswax, contrasting the qualities of each material.

But most of these artists are more immediately referential toward daily experience. One of the most interesting is Jersey City sculptor Wendy White, who takes her cues from auto detailing and urban Latino culture. "Bergen at Kensington" is a clump of plaster and Styrofoam cups blackened with ash and mounted on a racing-striped board that is itself on casters. It is in praise of urban trash, caught by a fence or a potted tree, which White sees as a kind of defiance -- "beautiful things happen when people either feel superior or belittled by their surroundings."

Ain't that the truth?