Hadley + Maxwell arrive at the door with a customized kit, like magi schooled in marketing. In the kit are home-decor solutions designed to correspond to the homeowner's answers on a quiz. The quiz veers from the absurd to the profound, including: Which objects in your home do you love and hate? If you could own any three artworks, what would they be? Has your house been broken into? Which rooms can we work in? Who do you idolize? Even: "Circle one. Frank Gehry is: a) a pervert. b) a romantic. c) misguided and confused. d) a genius. e) other (please specify)."
Here is where art gets personal, comes over for a visit. Yet this is professional, because the homeowners having the alterations done are art producers: curators, gallery directors, dealers, other artists. When the installations are complete, the artists do not do the documenting themselves. Instead, drawing a line between design and distribution, Hadley + Maxwell summon architectural photographer Sven Boecker to shoot the modified rooms as if for a lifestyle mag. His glossy photos are the "final" products in "The Décor Project," a bitingly smart experiment by what sounds like the high-concept design firm of Hadley + Maxwell.
Their real names are Hadley Howes and Maxwell Stephens, of Vancouver, B.C., and their Howard House show is the couple's first American solo outing. What they've created is neither studio nor public art. It is made in a hothouse of cultural commerce, where they can raise big, juicy questions about what artists do, and with and for whom.
On one level, the photographs are beautified receipts of exchange between people making art and people showing it. In a few of the seven situations in "The Décor Project," the subjects were the direct gatekeepers for dissemination of the photographs, running galleries where they'd be shown or editing journals where they'd be published. Every subject, except the one in Seattle, Frye Art Museum curator Robin Held, represents a venue where the artists have displayed work. (Billy Howard declined to be a subject.) There is more than a hint here of the implication that art arrives at its public by an incestuous commingling of artist and producer.
But this work is not an institutional critique. In a way that is far from unpleasant, the premise leaves the viewer outnumbered and out in the cold. Instead of the warm monogamy implied in a direct relationship between artist and viewer, this is triangulated voyeurism. It is impossible not to be curious about the transactions these images represent. The artists make no attempt to hide the details, providing the subjects' quiz responses in a binder. But the glamorized documents for sale on the wall deliciously defer exactly what has transpired, and give the feeling that some transaction continues. According to project rules, each home was immediately restored to its original state, but one is left to wonder about the imprint the project left, both on the relationship between the home and the homeowner, and the artists and their subjects. The images themselves, displayed in a prominent gallery, remain in the life cycle of artistic production and presentation. The way they are received could change the conditions of each relationship.
They also twist the notion of gallerists representing artists; here, artists represent gallerists and curators. In question is the nature of representation, a timely subject for the pluralistic contemporary curator Held, who left the Henry Art Gallery pledging to expand the representational focus of the Frye. In Held's apartment, Howes and Stephens arranged matching desk scenes pushed against each other to look as though one is real and one is a reflection. But close inspection reveals that the mirror conceit is false; there is no original and copy.
Each photograph betrays and obscures something of the participants, and of the process of gaining access to each other. In the case of Risa Horowitz, access was overtly limited. The Winnipeg gallery director was reticent about participating, confining the artists to her dining room. So Howes and Stephens, in a tone of almost mocking circumspection, covered all the room's objects in a protective blanket of white foam-core. In tribute to On Kawara (Horowitz expressed affection for repetitious minimalism), the artists painted the date on the wall, then the time of the sunrise. Each of the 17 resulting photographs represents the look of the room hourly until sunset. The interloping colors are vivid; the room is shy and unyielding.
Conversely, the artists seem almost conspiratorial with Jonathan Middleton, the curator of Vancouver's Western Front. In the middle of one of his rooms, they built a helix of stacked books and CDs, a neat, sculptural locked vault of intellectual information. In Middleton's bedroom are the piles of what has been displaced during the redecoration, giving the shoot an air of backstage authenticity. But in the gallery, maps of the objects referring to each photograph offer a conspicuously empty form of familiarity, like a catalog. Neither seeing nor naming the stuff is knowing it, or its owner.
There's the added layer of interest here that art decorates homes, and that these gleaming photographs would make lovely additions to the living room. Yet the secret knowledge they flaunt suggests it would be about as possible to own them as to take over someone else's memories. The high finish of the photographs does the opposite of make them complete. They tantalize instead of satisfying. Where is the art? Lorna Brown, the Vancouver curator and director of Artspeak, told Howes and Stephens that she wished she owned Manet's portrait of Berthe Morisot with a fan. So they made it for her, staging a re-creation in a mirror with a live model and capturing that on film. That Morisot portrait exists nowhere but in the photograph; does it exist?
"The Décor Project" cleverly provokes desire for an unreachable real thing, but it also is a series of simple tests of power and vulnerability that vary according to the participants. Some cases give the distinct feeling that not only the audience, but the artists, are seeking. Their work with Linda Dornan and John Asimakos, artists who are members of a New Brunswick gallery, is the result of both sides taking risks in trusting each other. Dornan has been sole caretaker of Asimakos, who suffers with dementia, for a decade. She granted Howes and Stephens entry into Asimakos's former studio, now a storage area, where they tied nearly everything together in a dense web of string that fills the room, blocking entry. This is the artists' most direct gesture. It is not a formal exploration. It is a gift that concretely honors the disease. If the studio is a measure of Asimakos's mental activity, everything is present, but nothing is accessible.
In elevating the before-after narrative of the home makeover to a quest about understanding and representation, Howes and Stephens have created a body of work haunted by negative space. The trick in these alluring nets of absence and presence is figuring out which is which.
