Photo credit: Rich Maciejewski
David Harper's "A Mouth-Shaped Room" runs through Sept. 15 at the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum.
Multi-disciplinary artist David Harper has disrupted the expected stately Renaissance charm of the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum in a most fantastic way. His exhibition, “A Mouth-Shaped Room” runs through Sept. 15, spreading throughout dozens of rooms and galleries in the spacious museum.
The show begins in the East courtyard, a female statue sitting low amongst the manicured hedges, and, for a moment, looks completely natural ... or naturally unnatural in its particular setting. But one soon notices that “she” is only the replicated upper half of a classical figure; sitting upright in a tiled bath and draining through a tube into a collection bottle. This is to catch the precipitates running off from her imminent deterioration, as she is made not of carved alabaster, but of a fugitive mix of milk and chalk.
Photo credit: Rich Maciejewski
A piece in David Harper's "A Mouth-Shaped Room" at the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum.
This particular piece provides an adequate crash course in the darkly humorous world of David Harper. It’s helpful to go into the show with some priming, as his works are complex, both conceptually and materially, full of allusions and references to everything from classical mythology, to botany, to art history, produced by any number of unexpected methods.
The first two sculptures I viewed inside the building were of a black lion’s head with Christina Aguilera-like blond hair, and a prancing black lamb atop pedestals next to an ornate armature holding dozens of handmade moths. Both live inside sculptural vitrines as impressive as their contents. It isn’t “still life with fruit” kind of art. It’s loaded, suggestive, macabre and surreal subject matter. But his penchant for creating dazzling hand-made vitrines, plinths and armatures takes the work from seeming fiendishly personal, to somewhat mediated and measured; characterizing him more as an eclectic Victorian-era accumulator than a shut-in with bodies in the crawlspaces.
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Harper’s displays run the risk of upstaging the subjects for which they are designed, a purposeful move. The most impressive example of this is in a dazzlingly ornate vegetal-themed room with marble accents on the second floor. An artist has two possible choices when installing in such a busy environment: to proceed with restraint and play up the contrast, or to let it ride. Harper lets it ride, and then some. This room contains a number of exquisite handmade displays housing everything from cast hands holding feathers, to vintage perfume squeeze bulbs. It’s all very elegant, delicate and precious, in a 19th-century drawing room kind of manner.
However, the large cross-planned reliquary holding another supine milk-and-chalk figural replica is breathtaking for its design, for its craft and for contributing to a pervasive feeling of entrapment and paralysis that persists throughout the show. Harper’s use of material is so broad and capable, and his constructions so elaborate, that one might easily overlook the pathos and poetry in them. Peppered throughout the show are wonderfully inventive and perfectly executed examples of physical restriction. There’s a series of four crutches with forearms and branches, a wall of appendages with restraining straps on them and a number of cast hands holding found vintage slides, which, displayed against the gaping expanse of Lake Michigan, sadly dwarf those lost and forgotten moments once so meaningful.
Photo credit: Rich Maciejewski
A piece in David Harper's "A Mouth-Shaped Room" at the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum.
Harper’s astounding sewing, casting and building capabilities mixes strangely with his conceptual interest in symbols of restriction and containment. One senses very little struggle in his making. He makes producing stained glass and hardwood chambers for taxidermized sheep appear effortless even as his subjects feel trapped by its maker. The contradiction begged me to reflect on the nature of Harper’s relationship to his own subject matter. It’s a lot to ponder. I continued to puzzle over the subject as I left Villa Terrace, finally considering David Harper to be equal parts Dr. Moreau, Willy Wonka, William Morris and Robert Gober.
