| Two concurrent exhibitions at Solvent Space in Richmond, Virginia—one a vibrant outdoor fabric installation by Richmond artist Rachel Hayes, the other a hushed, indoor installation by Icelandic artist Margrét Blöndal—work together, persuasively, to create meanings beyond the intentions of either artist. Taken together, the two installations become a metaphor for external and internal experience. Hayes transforms the building’s drab, industrial facade with formally beautiful squares of overlapping fabric. Their fluttering delicacy and luminous color adorn the building like clothing does a body. |  |
Inside Out: Margrét Blöndal and Rachel Hayes at Solvent Space – Heather Harvey
Two concurrent exhibitions at Solvent Space in Richmond, Virginia—one a vibrant outdoor fabric installation by Richmond artist Rachel Hayes, the other a hushed, indoor installation by Icelandic artist Margrét Blöndal—work together, persuasively, to create meanings beyond the intentions of either artist. Taken together, the two installations become a metaphor for external and internal experience.
Hayes transforms the building’s drab, industrial facade with formally beautiful squares of overlapping fabric. Their fluttering delicacy and luminous color adorn the building like clothing does a body. The work also has a slightly humorous effect—the daintiness of the fabric is juxtaposed against the stout sensibility of the brick building. At the same time, too, this contrast emphasizes the building’s physicality, making it read like a sturdy, protective carapace around a hidden interior.
The spindly fragility of Blöndal’s interior installation carries this metaphor forward: protective husk outside, wide-open and unresolved landscape of the mind, inside. Blöndal uses mass-produced or synthetic materials—rubber, wood, chalk, foam and plastic—but these are fragmented and de-contextualized of any obvious function. Ephemeral landmarks are scattered here and there amid otherwise uncharted terrain. The private logic of the dispersed, restrained installation approximates the winding trajectory of thought processes, like watching the untroubled musings of a curious, placid mind.
The cumulative effect of the two installations is the anthropomorphization of the site of Solvent Space itself. The inner and outer zones of the structure become a template through which to consider the intertwining realities of body and mind: the tangible and intangible, the public and private and the sensual and mental.
To be sure, however, each installation functions independently and contains layers of meaning unrelated to the other. Hayes’ work is effective on a purely formal level. It also suggests the psychedelic flags of nonexistent countries, massive beach towels hung out to dry or patchwork quilts made with repeating rectangles of brick, metal, glass and cloth.
Blöndal’s work suggests natural processes of decay and transformation and has an archaeological sensibility in its attention to subtle, unintended by-products of human activity. Blöndal tenderly attends to the incidental and the ordinary—to the unexceptional stuff of everyday life. Yet, the work’s peculiar anonymity (nothing here has a name) defamiliarizes these mundane activities and materials, drawing out their inherent mystery.
Whether intended or not, the pairing of the works of these two quite different artists creates a third, and surprisingly integrated experience. The building’s exterior becomes a stand-in for the body and the social presentation of the self, while the interior delves into the indeterminate, shifting rhythms of an inner life.
