By Ed Goldman
RAINDROPS KEEP FALLING IN MY HOUSE
If things go according to plan, the centerpiece of artist Stephen Kaltenbach’s new solo show at downtown Sacramento’s Verge Center for the Arts will be quite damaged by the time you see it. This is by design.
Kaltenbach’s show opened on June 10, which was also the 10th anniversary of Verge’s breaking ground on its own building at the site of a former Scofield’s furniture store at 625 S Street in downtown Sacramento. While the new show includes a handful of smaller works by Kaltenbach—a bronze, a painting, a video piece—the focal point of “What Death Does” is the stage set of a living room that will get rained on, by indoor sprinklers, until the exhibit closes on September 17.
“Over time, the rain’s going to ruin everything on that set,” says Liv Moe, the founder/director of Verge. She’s smiling as she says it but says she also has “no idea” how all that water will affect the building itself. Salvador Dali might have called the dilemma “The Persistence of Moisture.”
The set includes a sofa, desk, chair and rug—furnishings that were mostly gathered at the ReStore, Habitat for Humanity’s retail operation on North 10th Street.
“Throughout the run of the exhibition, simulated rain falls into the room,” explains guest curator Richard Haley. “Decay sets in at an accelerated pace with the aid of manufactured precipitation. Geological time becomes heightened and condensed into theatrical entropy. Deep time becomes visible through human perception.”
That’s heavy and heady stuff. But also entertaining—which is no surprise, given Kaltenbach’s oeuvre. His work is also currently on view in the exhibition “Together in Time” at the exquisite Hammer Museum in Westwood, one of the rare exhibition spaces where you can walk right up to a painting and study its brushwork without being shooed away by officious docents with walkie-talkies and earplugs, the worst kind.
It’s also in various prestigious collections—too many to list, but which include New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Berkeley Art Museum as well as that city’s Pacific Film Archive, Washington, DC’s National Gallery of Art, the Walker Art Center of Minneapolis, and, closer to home, Sacramento’s Crocker Art Museum. The Crocker has Kaltenbach’s enormous—and enormously moving—portrait of his dying father.
Kaltenbach also contributed to the show, which is being sponsored by the Albert and Elaine Borchard Foundation, a plaque embedded in the sidewalk just before you enter the building. It has a single word on it: SKIN. This is part of a series of what Moe calls the artist’s series of “elemental plaques.” Other solo-word offerings include FIRE, WATER and BLOOD.
While you could certainly call “What Death Does” an installation piece, connoisseurs and collectors of same often want to purchase them for homes or offices with generous square footage indoors or out to accommodate works that are thematic or environmentally suitable.
Yet it’s not likely collectors will opt to transport Kaltenbach’s water-damaged living room into their own spaces. It probably isn’t possible, either. I hope I didn’t just rain on your parade.
To check out the deets, go to vergecontemporary.org. Gallery hours are Thursday through Saturday, 11 a.m.to 5 p.m., and Sunday from noon to 5 p.m. The phone number is 916.448.2985.
#