Over the past 41 years, the Mattress Factory has shown approximately 700 artists, and its staff, over those same decades, has been in constant motion just keeping up: dismantling, reconstructing, and altering the patchwork of spaces in an unrelenting collaboration between institution and artist. This current exhibit had demanded no less rigor, and the artists selected and shown here, with their exciting and insightful bodies of work, extend and compliment the Mattress Factory's historical oeuvre, presenting both critical and presentational challenges for those of us tasked with the exhibition.
The work presented, though each is independent in conception, pose relationships between body, space, and time. These three touchstones of existence are a departure point for examining the paradoxes of the self—how we engage, create and relate to our ever-changing physical and psychological environments.
The gallery-spanning installation Lyrical, by OSGEMEOS—two twin brothers from São Paulo, Brazil—invites a combinatory experience of dreams, time, myth, music and motion. Through the entrance, the viewer gains access to another realm or a surreal and mystical world combining influences from the artists’ collection, family and their own dreams. (Lyrical was curated by Margery King.)