A Room Filled With Rubber and Cardboard
John Hill
6. december 2024
All photographs courtesy of Mattress Factory
Mattress Factory, the “artist-centered” museum housed in an early 20th-century Stearns & Foster mattress warehouse in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, recently opened REIFICATION, a site-specific installation by artist Eugene Macki that fuses sculpture and performance. Take a tour through some photographs of the installation.
Mattress Factory is an apt name for the institution founded by Barbara Luderowski in 1977, not only because of the building's history, but because “artists live in residence at Mattress Factory for weeks or months while they create something completely new,” per the museum's website. Therefore, artists are invited to immerse themselves in the spaces of the former warehouse and other buildings that now comprise the museum's campus to create site-specific installations that visitors will suitably immerse themselves within. As such, most exhibitions at Mattress Factory are temporary, though the museum does have some notable long-term exhibitions, including an Infinity Dots Mirrored Room (1996) by Yayoi Kusama, a trio of works by James Turrell (especially Pleiades [1983], an "exercise in patience" that requires visitors to sit and wait 15 minutes for their eyes to adjust to the darkness), Winifred Lutz's "archaeological" Garden (1997), and the reconfigurable Bed Sitting Rooms for an Artist in Residence (1988) by Allan Wexler. REIFICATION is on display at Mattress Factory from November 16, 2024 until November 30, 2025.
Mattress Factory's six-story brick building from 1900 is topped by Acupuncture, a light sculpture added by German artist Peter Kuhn in 2016.
Spanning the entire length of the fourth-floor gallery, the installation is made of rubber sculptures topped by chipped cardboard, a walkway down the middle of the space, walls covered in viscous rubber, and three video displays on the far wall.
The layering of cardboard over rubber-coated sculptures is accentuated by the glass guardrails at the front of the gallery.
The cardboard was meticulously cut into thousands of small rectangular pieces to “bury” the rubber-coated sculptures.
“Evoking the Terracotta Army of China as well as archaeological sites in Greece,” a statement from Mattress Factory reads, "REIFICATION references these ancient monuments while becoming an
activated site for discovery."
The walkway bisecting the gallery is sloped, elevating visitors to better engage with the installation: both the sculptural pieces on the sides and the videos on the back wall.
REIFICATION culminates in the videos screens displaying a series of durational performances by Macki and collaborator Michelle Boulé that took place in the same, albeit empty gallery.
The videos explore how the pair's movements activated the space, thereby displaying part of the artistic process enabled by Mattress Factory's unique residency program.
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