|
TimeOut March
11, 2009 Brian Tolle,
“Levittown” Brian Tolle is best known for his
Irish Hunger Memorial, an extraordinary public commission for Battery Park
City that incorporates a reconstructed family cottage dating from the time of
the Emerald Isle's infamous potato famine. In his first show at CRG, Tolle
again makes reference to domestic architecture, but focuses on more a
recent—and more local—example: Levittown, the Long Island housing
development, completed in 1951, which became a Stepfordlike
exemplar of postwar suburbia. Here, Tolle transforms the
standard Levittown house into soft-sculptural silicone multiples that are too
big for dolls but too small for people. Each flaccid box has been paired with
a different found object or objects, investing the formerly generic
machines-for-living with quirky personality. In most cases, the objects are
suitably mass-produced and domestic. In Nothing but Net, a bright blue
house hangs from a basketball hoop, while in Outgrown, a pink-tinted
abode partially smothers a stack of old toys. Elsewhere, cookie-cutter homes
are draped over a wheelbarrow and an ironing board; one is stuffed through a
tire swing. The different colors and distorted shapes echo that temptation to
customize, which utopian schemes inevitably provoke. Occasionally, Tolle extends this
allusion in more overtly political directions. Pinko,
for example, features a rose-colored house hanging from a flagpole from the
former Soviet Union—a neat reference to Cold War paranoia. But the less overt
likes of Father Knows Best, in which a mustard-colored house is wrapped
around a “salesman sample recliner,” function most effectively as the uncanny
totems of perfection perverted.—Michael Wilson |