Exterior view
Dream House: Sculpture
2008
All the pedestals from the gallery, furniture, storage closet, books
9’ x 12’ x 20’
Part of a two-person exhibition with Amanda Thatch, Accumulation, Paint Creek Center for the Arts, Rochester, MI
Exterior detail 1: Pedestal Bottoms
Exterior detail 2: Pedestal Bottoms
“In Dream House: Sculpture, seventy white art display pedestals are tipped over and stacked with their rectangular openings jutting out at various angles. This subverts conventional museum display norms, revealing the unseen plywood underside and hollow interior of the white-painted columns. Guided by a simple act of decision-making, Thompson’s conceptual approach transforms the support for a sculpture, typically unseen and not considered art, into the artwork itself. Viewers can enter the installation through a narrow corridor that leads to a view of the garden through a gallery window. Inside, a small office desk holds some fantasy books, including a 1960 edition of Lord of the Rings. The installation conjures various interpretations of “interiority”: the space within the artwork, the intimate realm of a private home, and the inner workings of the human mind.”
— Curator Nadja Rottner’s wall label text for Andy T’s Urban Vision
Exterior detail 3: Enter to the Right
Exterior detail 4: View of Entrance
Exterior view
My creative exploration focuses the spotlight on the seemingly mundane aspects of daily life: eating, cleaning house, reading books, etc, in attempts to identify the impact those experiences leave on my psyche. One cannot control what information will leave a lasting impression, nor when one will be struck by Proust’s mèmoire involontaire. My recent series of sculptures entitled Dream House are spaces to facilitate involuntary memory akin to Gaston Bachelard’s ideas of oneirism and daydreaming within simple domestic environments. With these installations there are accumulations of a found material massed in a simple mound that acts as a shell for an interior domestic space for the viewer to enter and perhaps get lost in their own reverie.
By making artwork from an accumulation of materials and experience, the work will always have multiple interpretations available depending upon the history of the materials and the history of the viewer. By creating works from items of questionable value I challenge myself to take on the responsibility of creating value for the artwork as a result of my creative labor power. The artist can exercise their transformative energies to materials, concepts and cultural paradigms to create a unique experience in time. My aesthetic approach is to compose “stuff” into works that tell a narrative or create an intimate space of retreat.
— Statement about the work excerpted from a longer artist statement, 2008
Interior detail 1: Passageway
Interior detail 2: Entering Reading Room
Interior detail 3: Reading Desk
Interior detail 4: Exiting Passageway
Other works in this series were Dream House at Detroit Industrial Projects; Dream House: Clothes Pit at Gallery Project; and Dream House: Box Full of Letters at Museum of New Art. “I wanted to look out the window…” at the Kansas City Art Institute preceded this series.