"The Everyday Interests of Young People," a three-room installation by Wendy Weiss and Jay Kreimer, is on exhibition at Tugboat Gallery through Sept. 28.
"The Everyday Interest of Young People" is about mixing, and watching, and at least three species of containment.
"Feel like the walls are closing in? The two of us are combining a number of our controlled obsessions, and crossbreeding in pursuit of a fertile hybrid. Each room is more about altering the space, and the weight of the space, than it is about the objects placed in the space. Some of it opens and some of it closes," said Weiss, a Professor of Textile Design in the Department of Textiles, Merchandising and Fashion Design at UNL.
"The Treescape is drawn with reused black polyester pants. It extends onto all six surfaces of the larger room at the Tugboat Gallery, surrounding the viewer with a gap-toothed forest," she said.
Weiss draws on the textures and linear elements of the places where she walks. The environment is immersive, expansive and playful yet contained.
Core is a 100-foot woven tube suspended by six columns. The work fills the room. The columns anchor and form a body for the very interior presence of the Core weaving. The weaving suggests the workings of the body: intestinal, umbilical, essential. It is exaggerated and deeply human. The feeling of gravity and concentration plays in contrast to the encompassing space of the tree scape. The viewer walks through the Treescape and gazes into the Core.
The Hard-To-See Theater plays with contraction and expansion, exterior space and interior space. The radically dropped and angled ceiling covers a red wooden stairway to a platform. Three heads rest on columns in an almost classical style, one nearly normal except for a feral smile, another red with devil's horns, and a third wearing a crown. Stooping to climb the stairs, the viewer discovers a viewing area that opens onto a small theater with thirty-two seats and three people in the audience. The film seems to be concerned with uncertainty and biology — the Everyday Interests of Young People. The three members of the audience, who turn periodically toward the viewer, seem to be enjoying the show.
The materials in Kreimer's Hard-To-See Theater are recycled and precycled. The steps and platform use lumber salvaged from a neighbor's deck. The video and heads suggest a remembered walk through psychic space. The false ceiling is precycled and will be reused to insulate and finish an attic ceiling.
Weiss and Kreimer's "The Everyday Interests of Young People" plays with human spaces, interior and exterior, and the passage between the open and the enclosed. The contrasts and continuities in the three rooms charge each other and invoke qualities of the many spaces humans inhabit.
Weiss is professor of textile design in the Department of Textiles, Merchandising and Fashion Design. Kreimer is a musician who performs internationally, an instrument maker, sculptor, composer and educator.
For more information go to http://www.jaykreimer.com and http://www.wendyweiss.org.
Tugboat Gallery is at 116 N. 14th St., second floor.