Installation artist Kerry Adams has plenty of experience with creating time-consuming and labor-intensive works, but in her prior installations, that meant a lot of sometimes non-traditional handicraft: monumental crocheting, suspending 500 teacups in a room, or stringing up and shaping 5,000 feet of cable from the ceiling. In her project currently underway, which will open on Friday at Spacetaker, it's less the handwork that's taking her time. This time, it's been the call for and collection of 100 old windows from around Houston, including many hours at the computer corresponding with dozens of sources.
For she is suspending these windows from the walls and ceiling of Spacetaker's gallery, which also serves as a meeting space for several ongoing programs. Visitors to the gallery will be confronted with an architectural expression of human activity, or rather, inactivity. Two rocking chairs will be positioned strategically across from each other, one still new and another that seems to have been worn down in a test of time.
The windows will form passages throughout the space and between the chairs. The immersed viewer will chance upon views of windows through windows, to consider not just the time it takes to install such a show, but the ways in which we all sit and wait and watch time pass. Or spend time, or lose it, or waste it. Or kill it.
"My work," says Adams, "is more site-responsive than site-specific." She is deploying the various quirks of the gallery space into her work, including a garage door at the front, and an odd nook in the back that must present the gallery's most challenging space in more typical shows, but will here offer a productive element for the arrangement of space.
What are you waiting for? Truly, this installation seems to ask that challenging question. And do you know how long you've been waiting? And do you sometimes fail to notice at all that you are waiting? The opening reception for Kerry Adams's show is Friday, June 3, 6 - 8 p.m., at the Spacetaker Artist Resource Center (ARC) Gallery, 2101 Winter Street, B11.The free show runs through June 25, Wednesday through Friday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. For more information, call 713-868-1839 or visit http://www.spacetaker.org.
