On View Now: Two Shows on Domesticity and the Housing Crisis
By Farah Abdessamad
A little over an hour by train from New York City, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum debuts Chiffon Thomas’ first solo museum exhibition. Thomas, a Joan Mitchell Foundation fellow who recently sold two works at the Armory in the $25,000 to $30,000 range and previously exhibited at PPOW and SculptureCenter, presents in “The Cavernous,” a series of sculptural works and installations on displacement and belonging.
In two large-scale installations, Thomas makes a powerful visual statement about corporeality and disembodiment. Two life-size, hyper-real fiberglass casts of human bodies lie on the floor. One is face down while the other silhouette is turned to the side. Their heads are buried into two large dome structures from which a feeble light pulsates and glows. The domes almost appear as an extension of their bodies and we wonder what they see, what attracted these human moths to seek refuge in that light, into the confines of that protected space.
In front of the Aldrich stands Thomas’s first public installation. There, he replicates a similar scene except that in daylight and the open space, we perceive rustiness in the copper complexion of the human figure that mimics the dome’s steel structure.
Thomas, who recently moved to LA from Chicago, hints at the well-known issue of unhoused people which disproportionately affects people of color, the failed premise of geodesic domes as a solution to potentially increase housing, and so much more. The domes, and their replicas, which are shown in smaller sculptures in a second room and use stained glass and stitched silicon, evoke the membrane of a womb and a lens to other realms. In that second exhibition room, Thomas includes other materials such as cement which propels and elevates the sculptures as edifices.
With an Afro-futurist outlook, one can imagine the dome as an orb—a cosmic proposition to reconsider homes not in material terms but in spiritual ones. The human bodies are transfixed by the duality of an interior-exterior. The dome symbolizes a window, a threshold, a space that becomes part of them and which they sometimes carry like an Atlas, bearing the weight of the heavens on their shoulders. But the dome is more than a responsibility; it is nourishment, which Thomas reminds us when the dome is placed on and around the body’s umbilical cord.
What’s public, private, accessible, out of reach? A common thread between these two shows is how artists choose to represent abundance and scarcity, which are woven into the layers they ascribe to a home. In “Moveables,” objects barely mask a lack of human warmth. Furniture pieces are relics, vestiges and hollow witnesses to empty dreams of commodified happiness. In conversation with Thomas’s cosmic longings, the works draw outlines of a post-human existence and offer a social critique of modernism. Efficiency, reproduction and aesthetics failed to give us a sense of harmony. Instead of fitting to human form and needs, humans have been pushed aside by these distorted shapes. They require other homes.
“Moveables” echoes “Improbable Furniture,” a show that premiered at Philadelphia’s ICA in 1977. Then as now, artists demonstrate the malleability of function and form and design as a canvas for whimsical and fantastical imagination. They force us to discern social contexts and how these shape the boundaries of when a couch becomes more than a couch. Similarly, in Thomas’s works, design is a site of policy failure and boundless possibility. Both shows point out the need to grant homes new and urgent incarnations of humanity.