The MATRIX Gallery at Wadsworth Atheneum has hosted dozens of contemporary artists since the series was founded in 1975, and Valeska Soares is the most recent.
But Soares’ vision is too big to fit into that smallish rectangular space. It spills over into Avery Court, circling all around Pietro Francavilla’s “Venus with Nymph and Satyr” fountain. “I can barely contain myself,” Soares said.
Soares, a Brazilian-born conceptual artist based in New York, visited the Atheneum last year, wandering its galleries and poring over its stored collections. She was impressed by the furniture holdings, which includes hundreds of tables and chairs. She found 31 tables from the 16th to 20th century that caught her fancy, brought them up to the courtyard, arranged them around the fountain and covered them with red, black, white or gray swatches of felt, what she calls “basic Bauhaus colors.”
“It’s a minimal arrangement. A lot of people see different things,” Soares said. “There are different ways of seeing it from above and below.”
From the courtyard, Soares’ installation looks like a clutch of tables. Seen from one of the floors above, it resembles a color field of various shapes and sizes.
Soares was dismayed, however, at the lack of beds in the museum’s collection. “It’s such an iconic furniture. You are born in it. You die in it. You spend half your life in it,” she said.
So she conceptually started a headboard collection for the museum. She bought 15 headboards of differing styles, sizes and eras, bolted them together and painted them with swatches of red, yellow, white and black. The installation sits, maze-like, against carpeting as bright red as the red paint on the headboards.
MATRIX curator Patricia Hickson said the headboard collection also can be viewed different ways. “Is this painting? Is it sculpture? Is it a decorative art object? Is it an installation?” Hickson said.
It can be all of those things, as well as a channel for nostalgia. “I feel like walking in here, and seeing the headboards, you can relate to a particular one, a bed you saw as a child, that triggers something in your memory,” Hickson said.
The carpet that matches the artwork was inspired by the Atheneum, too. When Soares was soaking it all in all those months ago, she wandered into the Gray gallery of American art and saw a 1792 Ralph Earl painting whose carpet matched the gallery carpet. “It was like the room was coming out of the painting,” she said. “The room became an installation itself.”
VALESKA SOARES: MATRIX 176: UNFOLD will be at Wadsworth Atheneum, 600 Main St. in Hartford, until May 7. thewadsworth.org.
