“Variations on a Room”

It’s nothing new for an artist to take an object out of its natural context, place it in a gallery and ask viewers to rethink all of their previously held beliefs about it. But in Ginger Wolfe and Primitivo Suarez’s “Variations on a Room,” the Los Angeles–based husband-and-wife team present the gallery itself from a new perspective.

The artists’ installations Ceiling and Floor are actually walls covering opposite corners of GARDENfresh’s main space. Ceiling is a triangular slab of drywall with a blinding fluorescent ceiling light smack-dab in the middle. The unlit Floor is a triangle-shaped sheet of cheap, gray linoleum tile. Together, these two objects seem to form the crucial elements of a room. The space’s barrenness makes it feel like there should be another piece somewhere, but presumably the thought of putting a wall on the floor wasn’t too exciting.

In the smaller project space, Wolfe and Suarez document site-specific works constructed in the California desert. Billboard comprises a photo of a billboard frame they built alongside a model of this installation, complete with tiny tumbleweed. Shed’s photograph and model depict the isolated windows and doors they put up to evoke an abandoned structure.These pieces sometimes come off like witty one-liners, but they have a subtle purpose: challenging us to give the everyday spaces and places we inhabit a closer look.