“Houses and Hotels” from Donna Dennis at O’Flaherty’s in New York: Exhibition Review

I have seen hundreds of art exhibitions across New York City and nearby areas this past year, and I don’t remember anything like this March-April’s “Houses and Hotels” from Donna Dennis at the art gallery O’Flaherty’s in Manhattan’s East Village.

None of the pieces on display were all that new, instead dating most recently to 1994. The show featured five relatively large sculptural pieces, all of which were created to mirror real-world architecture — the “houses and hotels” of the show’s title. Dennis herself, from Ohio but now based in New York, remains active, with recent exhibitions (beyond this O’Flaherty’s show) in New York, Philadelphia, and beyond.

By the Waterfront, but Indoors…

“Cataract Cabin,” on display in a section of O’Flaherty’s with large windows forcing an element of illumination, was a standout and a nice example of this: a piece closely resembling an actual waterfront cabin (that I imagined as a vacation spot or something similar, aka not a permanent, everyday residence). It’s an actual structure perched atop a three-dimensional recreation of a rocky outcropping. There’s even an artist-made boat leaning on that portion and making the whole piece intermingle with its physical surroundings.

The smaller-than-functional boat is sitting at ground level, making the floor — and you while you’re on it — of wherever “Cataract Cabin” is placed a part of the experience.

The effect is something like a very large dollhouse or a mysteriously shrunken place of residence where someone actually lived. It all looks real enough to invoke our real-world experiences of this variety of structure, but it’s of a proportion that it’s clearly not functional, taking you somewhere that nods to the familiar but becomes a surreal dream.

It was similar across the whole show, though the actual structures varied. I’m personally a fan of the use in art of materials classified perhaps as more of an “everyday” thing — wood, wallpaper, household goods, discarded/lost objects, and I think Dennis was centering a sometimes underappreciated but persistent spiritual element to the lists from that category that generally comprise a house, a porch, or a bed. These materials surrounding and essentially defining our physical experiences have innate character; they’re putting something out.

The Personal Labor of Construction

Here, what Dennis centers across these “houses and hotels” feels like the painstaking, detailed labor of construction — physical, but also emotional. In looking with a vantage point we don’t normally get considering the much larger proportions of these things in the everyday, the processes of construction seem careful, personal, and even loving — at least presenting the opportunity for that. She spotlights the warm, enveloping emotional terrain of screened porches. It’s methodical but not going to be razor-sharp.

There’s a lot of wood, with its sometimes coarse, choppy textures. Wallpaper and neon also showed up — elements that breathe life but stay in that realm, at least here, of spotlighting human touch.

The overall proportions of all of this — smaller-than-life but still detailed enough to invoke it — are also a central element. Proportions-wise, Dennis settled on something still incredibly impactful (they’re all large) but nonetheless shorn off from the everyday world’s spaces. In some ways, you might say that Dennis’ pieces leave the viewer feeling “there”… but not, as if balancing one part in a dream and another in cold, biting reality. It’s the elusive physicality of a dream given its real-world analogue.

Dreams — actual dreams — tend to mean something because of their real-life associations, and Dennis’ pieces create a physical mirror of all of that. If you associate one of the structures with memory, you might lock in to a current of sadness or just somber feeling when standing before these sweeping but somewhat quiet creations. But the work all seems comfortable with that juxtaposition, putting an ache of something out of reach alongside craftsmanship and closeness.

In, perhaps, 1986’s “Tourist Cabin with Folded Bed,” it’s quiet, but you’re there: present, experiencing. The darkness across most of the exhibition, left to the illumination provided by the pieces themselves, reiterated the moving quietude.

“Houses and Hotels” from Donna Dennis is on view at NYC’s O’Flaherty’s through April 28.

Featured image: Donna Dennis, “Tourist Cabin with Folded Bed” (1986); Courtesy Donna Dennis and O’Flaherty’s. Photography by Dylan Obser and Matthew Conradt