Drawing Inspiration Everywhere from Kubrick to the Kitchen, Four Artists Address Human Impact on the Home

As the Korean artist Do Ho Suh has said, “home is something that you carry along with your life ... it’s something that you can repeat over and over again.” This month, along with three other artists, he will address various iterations of that idea in the group show “DOM” at London’s Gazelli Art House. The exhibition will include sculptural and spatially focused works that investigate the ways in which humans interact with—or, as is often the case, dominate—the environments they call home. 

The show features the work of four artists working with vastly different approaches to installation art, among them the set designer Elena Rendina, who has transformed a section of the gallery into a recreation of an everyday domicile swathed in silver, gold, and leopard print. Her whimsical treatment of otherwise banal objects is complemented by Suh’s “Specimen Series” (2013), a continuation of his famed sculptural work, in which everyday household appliances—an oven, a refrigerator, an electrical outlet—are rendered with precision, in translucent polyester, a meditation on the subtle and often unnoticed architectures of the home. 

Along with these sculptural works of displacement and domestication, “DOM” features larger-scale installations that are intended to operate within their surroundings as much they address them. In Aaron Koblin and Ben Tricklebank’s Light Echos (2013), RGB lasers have been projected from a moving train onto the Fillmore and Western Railway train tracks—tracks used for hundreds of Hollywood movie scenes—in and around Los Angeles. Using a piece of software developed by Koblin, the artists superimpose topographic maps and Walt Whitman quotes onto the railway yards, using long-exposure film to capture the delicate neon gestures. Their process has also been documented in a short film. 

The photographer Charlotte Colbert, whose work is often informed by her practice as a screenwriter, pays homage to Stanley Kubrick’s seminal film 2001 in her eerie photography series, “In and Out of Space” (2014), which places Kubrick’s iconic, mythical figures—an ape, an astronaut—in the former site of the famed In & Out club in Piccadilly, London. Using the language of film and a site-specific canvas, Colbert collapses the past and the present in her stark and surreal series; the images are also on display on the facade of the club in which the images were shot.

—Molly Osberg