Erin Curtis is in the house to put you in one. For her installation House Painting, the artist has turned Lawndale Art Centers Mezzanine Gallery into a labyrinth leading to hidden spaces. Curtis uses cardboard walls covered with wallpaper to divide up the gallery, creating rooms filled with furniture and knickknacks from the 1920s to the 2000s. The resulting rooms are so seemingly timeless, they could come from your house or your great-grandmothers. Large paintings of imagined rooms hang on the gallerys walls; one, of an entrance to a house, seems welcoming but proves to be nothing more than a false invitation. The installation as a whole is meant to confuse viewers and turn them around, so remember that some of the rooms are actually pictures before you run head-first into them.
Mondays-Saturdays. Starts: Aug. 30. Continues through Oct. 6, 2007
This article appears in Aug 30 – Sep 5, 2007.