Gallery Garage

In a tiny phone booth-sized room within a garage in residential San Francisco, a performance artist sits completely still, his head wrapped in red garage rags, his lap cradling 10 fish heads. He is meditating.

Around the corner, three cocoons woven from wire hang from the underbelly of a stairwell, vibrating at intervals. The pear-sized contraptions look a bit like small cages suspended from the ceiling with long, icicle-like wires.

In the middle of the garage, an electric train goes ’round and ’round on its circular track, making a gentle, steady noise, a soft humming sound. Nearby, three beanbag chairs provide a place to sit and dream.

It’s almost as if you’ve wandered onto the set of a play, the stage set for some surreal one-act thriller. But the drama is what you see before you. And the dialogue is your own to create. The directors? The Reno artists behind the scenes of an art installation they call d3ms.

Less than half a block from Golden Gate Park, a slim, seaside-style house stands bathed in the ethereal red glow of a porch lantern. I pass by it once. I’m driving on the opposite side of the street, looking for 882 45th Ave., but it’s hard to make out numbers in the darkness. Then I see it: A small, handmade sign in a car’s front windshield that proclaims d3ms, with an arrow pointing to the glowing house’s garage.

I park and wander in. The garage, which sits underneath the house, could be a teenage boy’s hideout: My eye travels from the beanbag chairs to the moving train, then to the garage’s far wall. It’s been turned into a video screen.

I guess I’d been expecting something—well, something that looks more like art.

The simplicity is disarming. The room sucks me in, calls me to sit down on the chairs or peer into the corners. The garage is not a gallery. It seems like a part of the art itself.

Then the artists, the directors of this unlikely set, step onto the scene. Joseph DeLappe, with piercing gray eyes and close-cropped dark hair, greets me first and introduces me to Tamara Scronce, a poised redheaded woman with a welcoming smile. They are confident, excited about their works of wire, plastic and wood. As I talk to them, then to the other three artists, the ideas behind the installation come into focus. As they begin weaving their artistic narratives, this unusual set of props becomes a set of stories.

The title comes from the names of the five contributing artists—J. Damron, DeLappe, Russell Dudley, Laurie Macfee and Scronce (three “D’s,” an “M” and an “S”). Together they create traveling installations of photography, sculpture, video and performance art. They last showed their work in a San Francisco residential garage during a weekend in mid-January, an exhibit that lasted less than 24 hours.

Macfee says that the artists, whose work as part of d3ms is tailored specifically to non-traditional art spaces such as garages, basements and warehouses, join a growing faction of artists who are showing their work for short periods of time in underground environments.

“It’s not about the space you give me, it’s about the space I’m going to find,” Macfee says, in way of capturing the attitude of the dissident artists. “There are so many condoned spaces for artists to do their work, so this idea of making something new and just trying to define it yourself—it’s an idea that’s coming about.”

Macfee, the director of Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery at the University of Nevada, Reno, has a youthful exuberance about her. She is warm and personable, and it seems fitting that her pieces—three beanbag chairs and a card table—are such inviting works of art. Macfee says that the chairs are intended to capture the garage’s youth hideout quality—they are reminiscent of childhood, of rec rooms and basements. Yet Macfee says that her works also evoke gambling culture. Made of gambling table covers, her green felt beanbag chairs sport Harrah’s logos.

“[The chairs create] an iconographic site where you could sit and dream, this fabulous space you could almost own, this relaxing, contemplative space,” she says. “[Yet] they’re impregnated with smoke, human touch and ash. [They are] about loss, gambling, risk … an adult world. … It is very much about dichotomy.”

They are also about interaction. Macfee says that on the first night of the two-day show, when upwards of 60 spectators came through the garage, people were lounging on the beanbag chairs and even playing cards on her card table in the corner.

“I really like that people interact with them,” she says. “It becomes part of the experience of the piece.”

Damron, an adjunct professor of art at Sierra Nevada College, lends another, slightly less comforting side to the d3ms experience. With his tousled blond hair and quiet demeanor, Damron seems like a peaceful guy well-suited to adopt a “meditative” pose in his performance art piece. But sharing a small room with 10 fish heads, he says, was an intentionally discomforting act meant to upset his audience’s sense of ease and to push his own comfort boundaries. It’s the sort of thing, he says, that “requires you to wake up.”

“[It’s about] a place to go to be alone,” he says. “If you can’t get to [a place of transcendence] by just meditating, if you went to a comfortable place and just sat and meditated, and it isn’t healing. … I guess sometimes you can go a different route.”

“Why fish?” I ask.

Damron answers that the fish are scraps of San Francisco culture, bought in Chinatown on the morning of his performance and imbued with a “local kind of smell.” And local or not, Damron says there’s just something about the “look, feel and sheen” of fish.

And what about the smell? I ask. Even with their heads severed just that morning, dead fish still smell like dead fish.

“It wasn’t too bad,” Damron replies. “If you don’t get too close.”

The five artists first worked together last summer at the Santa Fe International Art Fair. They were all part of a collaborative project called Reknow—a play on the name “Reno” and the idea of re-knowing—that was curated by Macfee and by the director of San Francisco’s Refusalon Gallery. Scronce says that the artists already knew one another from “living, working and socializing in our relatively small community” but, until Reknow, had never shown together before.

“All [our] works are pretty much in non-traditional art media: kinetic art, performance, photography, video, soft sculpture, text. And the fact that the installation of the work is in interaction with the site and that the experience of the work is fleeting,” DeLappe says. “People responded with close to universal praise and astonishment that the type of work on display was coming out of Reno.”

To create Reknow, Macfee says that they approached the show “subversively,” thinking of their space at the art fair as “a disruption, an experiment in the midst of a traditional venue.” The experiment worked.

“When we were in Santa Fe, we all looked at one another and said, ‘Wow, this really works together’,” Scronce says. “There was a common thread.”

The five artists came back to Reno and wove that thread into the d3ms collaborative.

“Santa Fe galvanized us as friends and fellow artists. It only seemed logical to take that energy and move it into a collaborative effort that would go beyond [Santa Fe],” DeLappe says. “We have all been frustrated on a certain level by the isolation that is often indicative of functioning as a contemporary artist outside of what are considered mainstream art-world cities. Working together to create exciting and challenging art is what we all strive to do individually. Forming a collaborative and engaging in projects as a group functions to harness our individual energies toward a common goal.”

The collective installation first showed on Dec. 7 in Dudley’s warehouse-turned-art-studio on Dickerson Road. The artists plan to take their work to similar non-traditional sites in various cities during the coming months. Sort of like they’re in a band, they say.

“We have talked a lot about our urban ‘touring’ possibilities—Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, Toronto—but also about less urban possibilities such as roadside locations in seemingly less important locales,” Scronce says.

She adds that she’s interested both in how the five artists’ work functions together in unlikely spaces and in how people in various cities respond to their work.

“I am interested in spaces that range from the trunk of my car or the back of a truck at a roadside location to the quiet, clean and more refined conditions of a professional gallery,” she says.

As I spend time talking to each artist, it becomes more and more clear that every piece in the installation is in dialogue with the site itself. Scronce, an assistant professor of art at UNR, tells me that her cocoon shapes work best into a room’s most discrete places—behind doors and around corners. Because cocoon shapes suggest hidden transformation—gradual change that takes place in secret—it seems fitting that Scronce’s cocoon sculptures are perhaps the least visible pieces in the installation. From the vibrating wire cocoon shapes hanging underneath the stairwell to the tiny, delicate cocoon form behind a window outside the garage, her works are so out-of-the-way you could easily miss them altogether.

“[It’s] about drawing attention to seemingly less important spaces,” Scronce says. “Quieter, less obvious and consequently subtler spaces.”

Yet, while cocoons are intriguing because of the mysteries going on inside of them, Scronce says that she is also fascinated by a cocoon’s “form and surface.” Cocoons are evocative, she says, of both masculine and feminine forms.

“The forms [suggest] both phallic and breast shapes,” she says. “The way I was building them, there seemed to be a very specific masculine and feminine. I’m interested in the coexistence of the masculine and the feminine—it becomes almost an androgyny. It’s not one or the other; it’s seemingly both.”

For DeLappe, the garage does more than give form to the installation: It calls up memories of his childhood. The house and garage belong to his mother, and, while this wasn’t his childhood home, he grew up in a similar house nearby. In that sister house, DeLappe spent countless hours playing with trains. His electric train piece, then, is in a sense a re-visitation of childhood.

The small locomotive is attached to a piece of chalk, DeLappe explains. The chalk in turn draws a continuously thickening white circle around the track as it moves with the train. Also attached to the train is a tiny video camera, which is pointed at the moving chalk. The chalk’s movement is taped and projected onto the plastic-lined garage wall in real time.

“It’s over-manufactured, technical [but] playful. All those things are tied up,” DeLappe says. “And it’s fleeting, too. … To me it’s become a beautiful little mandala, almost.”

DeLappe, who is an associate professor of art at UNR, tells me that the train is not only about childhood, but about a more adult world as well. Because of its mechanized and predictable path, DeLappe says, the train suggests an adult ability to control (and, with the real-time video, document) the world, at least in miniature. But then again, with its endless rotation and futility of movement, DeLappe says, it is also a statement on things being “out of control.”

DeLappe says that his work deals largely with technological themes. His other works on display include a basketball larded with dozens of computer mouse balls and a triad of sketches of what look like abstract clouds of ink. By attaching a pen to his computer mouse, DeLappe charted the movements of his mouse over the course of three weeks and arrived at these abstract sketches.

One of the most captivating things about d3ms, I soon realize, is the way its trains, chairs and tables knock down the wall that separates art from the everyday object. Dudley does this in the most unlikely of ways—the medium for his “conceptual” or “kinetic” sculpture is the transparent pushpin. I watch as Dudley, a not-too-tall guy with angular features and long, curly hair, reaches up to the rafters to point out his works—beautiful, pushpin clouds that hang from the garage rafters like tree branches.

He pulls a part of the “branch” down to show me how’s it’s made: He uses candle wax to fuse the blunt ends of the pins together into a basic two-pin unit. I marvel, and he gives me the little plastic twig to keep.

A souvenir. I turn the pin over in my palm and smile. A tiny part of the show will travel home with me—will be mine to keep.

I say goodbye to the artists and take one last look around the garage. The art, I know, will remain in the garage for only a few hours after I leave, then get trucked back to Reno to await its next gallery site. But something about the fleetingness of the work makes it all the more powerful—I feel like I’ve been part of a performance, not just an outsider or observer.

For DeLappe, this fleeting quality is a major part of what makes d3ms work.

“The energy and spontaneity of our projects in many ways is in response to the temporality of the spaces we have created so far,” he says. “It is there, then gone.”