[1] 
[2] 
[3] All above images are Untitled from the "Domestic Setups" series,
color photographs using original sculpture, 1995.
by Andy Brumer
[1]
[2] [3] (Craig Krull Gallery, Santa Monica) The home,
with its dynamic, divine, and at times, demonic tensions, remains for artists
of every kind a symbolic well that all but begs for exploration. As a work
of architecture, a house and its interior stands as an autonomous art object
in and of itself. As a psychological caldron, which forges the fate and
feeds the souls of the family members it shelters, a house reads like a
novel, full of narrative wanderings and twists.
For years Jo Ann Callis has engaged everyday household objects as if they
were actors brimming with dramatic and archetypal luminosity in photographs
of haunting beauty and technical virtuosity. In this exhibition, Callis
independently displays a group of small clay, hand-sculpted, brightly colored
beds, tables, potted plants, rugs and chairs, that she made for a series
of color photographs titled Domestic Setups (recently shown at the Santa
Monica Museum of Art). This exhibition will include a selection of those
photographs, which in any case must be considered along with the sculptural
objects.
Callis arranges these small furniture sculptures into imagined stage-like
rooms. She then photographs and mats them in vintage fabrics from the late
1950's and early 1960's. The photographs display both a jazzy and bold sense
of composition, as well as present sophisticated and subtle art historical
references. They create psychologically and emotionally complex, imaginative
environments that are at once inviting and foreboding.
Callis' furniture "steps out" of the picture frames and find themselves
arranged into small, tasteful tableaus (on top of fabric-covered floors),
which are then suspended from the gallery's walls. It is as if these fun
and eccentrically shaped objects, covered with brightly colored flocking,
have such a metaphorical life of their own they cannot remain contained
within the virtual space of the photograph. They need some real air to breathe.
The fluffy, rolling undulations of blanket on an orange bed become alternately
a gentle heaving of maternal breasts and a patriarchal barreled chest. The
ends of the armrests on a hot pink arm-chair sprout subtle nipples that
await fondling. The cover of a charcoal black bed transforms itself into
an elongated vulva, while an accompanying black night table placed next
to it seems to have reincarnated itself into a sexy negligee. The leaves
of one plant suddenly seem to sprout floppy puppy-dog ears, while those
of another begin to spiral together like some sinister metallic DNA. There
is a kind of visual punning and onomatopoeia going on here, with a melding
together of what an object looks like and what it has been conventionally
built and designed to do.
A warmth, grace and accessibility, emerges from these sculptures that remains
ambivalently (perhaps inherently, due to the medium) withheld in the photographs.
They promise a delicate flight of fancy from the repetitions and predictability
of quotidian life. and, when coupled with the photographs, establish an
artistic tour-de-force that viewers will find both aesthetically refreshing
and intellectually stimulating.
