The Rice Thresher

Location: http://the.ricethresher.org/ae/2005/11/18/eminent_domain

November 18, 2005 > Arts & Entertainment > Seductive ‘Domain’ places nature at forefront

Seductive ‘Domain’ places nature at forefront

By Marshall Robinson | Thresher Editorial Staff

Matthew White and Frank Webb’s new installation at the Rice Art Gallery, Eminent Domain, personifies the never-ending battle of man versus nature. Their environment’s mixture of black and white structures juxtaposed against a gargantuan color landscape can not help but brighten a viewer’s day.

White and Webb, with backgrounds in ballet and finance, respectively, are an unlikely duo of interior designers. They have garnered recent fame from a line of furnishings entitled the Intaglio Collection — intaglio is Italian for etchings — and their fascination with this lithograph-based art form served as a foundation for their installation at the Gallery. The graphic furniture pieces are covered with hyper-enlarged antique engravings, and one, Chandelier A, inspired the installation and serves as the center and focal point of the space.

Chandelier A, the only permanent piece in the gallery, is constructed of rigid plastic adorned with a silk screen of a 17th-century engraving. In the center of the gallery, surrounding the chandelier, sits a small, black-and-white pavilion. The interior is adorned with 18th-century French engravings and its floor is etched from the Great Mosque in Damascus, while the pavilion’s ceiling has Italian origins. These elements combine to create a visually enticing, worldly space.

The monochromatic pavilion houses a table below the chandelier, on which rests a box of pinned-down, cardboard butterflies. Upon looking up from the small box of butterflies and out into the rest of the gallery, the humor of the exhibit becomes apparent: The stark center is juxtaposed with surroundings of gigantic, vividly colored plants and insects, and as viewers step off the sterile pavilion floor they are greeted with Astroturf and “natural” chaos.

The walls are painted a flat, vibrant green to match the Astroturf and are decked in hand-colored, oversized etchings of biologically accurate garden life. The etchings are taken from Maria Sibylla Marian’s Erucarum Ortus, one of the earliest and most comprehensive works of its kind, and are all so well reproduced that only after close examination does a viewer realize they are blown up copies of thumbnail-sized images.

Some of the pieces lie flush with the walls while others jut out into the gallery, giving the illusion of higher dimensions, but the expansiveness of the hand coloring on each piece immediately catches the viewer’s eyes. Although their work is not true to the original colors, White and Webb create color combinations that explode off the walls and draw in viewers.

The large glass panes at the front of the gallery allow the installation to take on different characteristics as the light changes. At night, overhead lamp bulbs fill the room with flat light that brings out the artificial nature of the environment, and gazing out of the gallery’s windows makes one feel trapped in some onerous, Wonderland-esque curiosity box. But during the day, the gallery floods with natural light and is magically converted into an amicable fairy land. Every piece almost sings with an air of spring, and the desire to sit down and have a tea party is barely resistable.

The installation’s title, Eminent Domain, is meant to evoke questions of man’s evolving dominion over nature. The artists wage the battle between ancient natural and modern artificial worlds with plants so large they dwarf the structure engulfing them. The political implications of such statements are not explored, but viewers cannot help musing over the tongue-in-cheek clash between the installation’s natural and artificial components.

White and Webb engage the viewer uniquely in Eminent Domain. Their fusion of the classical and natural into a collage makes unexpected, beautiful sense, and every piece in the gallery brings nature to life in a way that leaves many viewers questioning the concrete jungle of Houston. No matter one’s thoughts on the urban world, though, everyone should take time to sit on one of the specially designed benches in the garden and take in these pretty little etchings on a colossal scale.

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