Kevin House: The Roadside Museum of the Mind rounds up meticulously handmade miniatures and off-kilter imagery
Opening at East Van’s Outsiders and Others gallery on July 6, exhibit features sculptures crafted to look like timeworn found objects
Kevin House’s The ballad of Deacon D Kane (a book about a book that never was written), crafted from wood, paint, cardboard, clay. Photo by Kevin House
Kevin House’s Homesick for the uncharted, hand-carved wood and paint. Photo by Kevin House
Outsiders and Others presents Kevin House: The Roadside Museum of the Mind from July 6 to 27
WITH HIS SHOW The Roadside Museum of the Mind opening in less than a week, Kevin House is a busy man, and when asked how he’s doing he has a succinct answer. “Oh, you know,” he reports from East Vancouver. “Details, details, details!”
Those familiar with this visual artist, singer-songwriter, and antiquarian’s varied preoccupations shouldn’t be surprised. Whether considering the marbled endpapers of a Victorian rarity, the perfect placement of each note on the guitar, or how to wring the most peculiarity out of his paintings, photographs, and sculptures, House maintains consistently high standards—and a consistently personal vision.
Exactly what he’s trying to say is another matter. “I would never tell someone what to see,” he asserts, quoting the visionary filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s maxim that “If you look too hard for meaning you may miss the experience.”
Probably good advice, especially given that in his visual work, House has a knack for creating surfaces that are themselves endlessly fascinating. I can’t see you not seeing anything but if I could I would look one last time, a tiny, camera-shaped sculpture, presents as a found object but has been meticulously crafted to look like it’s spent a hundred years in an attic, enduring extremes of summer heat and winter chill. UCM-Y1Z, a painting that references Art Deco tropes without quite mimicking anything from the 1920s or ’30s, has a similarly weathered appearance, as if retrieved from the derelict back room of a Jazz Age design studio.
The phantom crutch co. features two pairs of wooden crutches, sized for a pet monkey, that have the patina of something used in rough weather for decades. They were, however, made within the past few months. And then there are two extraordinary dioramas, The Ballad of Ariel Quintet (who presumably destroyed all of their paintings) and Deacon D Kane (a book about a book that never was written), that each contain a world within their shoebox-sized “rooms”.
A viewer could look at those last works for days and find something new in them with each glance, they’re so detailed and evocative.
Kevin House’s It’s a miracle we even have a heart to break, wood and mixed-media sculpture. Photo by Kevin House
Dioramas, sculptures, paintings, faux barn finds, even House’s otherworldly songs, which combine echoes of the Americana past with mysteriously off-kilter imagery: all these things effectively serve as triggers for speculation. What they say is obscure, and less important than what they might suggest.
House has a couple of takes on this.
“To go back to the music thing,” he says, “it’s just like you would never tell someone how a piece of music should make them feel. I feel the same way about the visual work—and, also, anything out of scale is magical. As soon as you change the scale of something, there is some kind of magic that happens. For instance, the crutches. They’re around 13 or 14 inches long, so they become something else. I can’t always pinpoint what, but when you hold the crutches they become talismans, or divining rods….They become something more than the object.
“I’m really interested in the fractured narrative of things—the pollination of time and space,” he continues. “If you think how our brains work, they are these fractured things… Like ‘Why am I thinking of this thing from this meaningless conversation from 30 years ago?’ The fractured narrative just seems like the natural state of the human mind. And there’s some element of that in the pieces. I think the juxtaposition of ideas is what’s interesting: crossed narratives, and the history, and the present.
“I don’t know if that’s coherent,” he adds, but in the context of The Roadside Museum of the Mind—which opens at the Outsiders and Others gallery (716 East Hastings Street) on July 6 and runs until July 27— it makes perfect sense. (House will also play a solo show at the Heatley, just a block west on East Hastings, on July 21.)
Tellingly, House finds that his best ideas arrive, largely unbidden, in the early morning. “That first half hour after you wake up but before you’ve made your shopping list of who you are and what you do in life? A large percentage of my ideas came in that half hour, whether that relates to the subconscious, dreams, or freedom from the rational, thinking mind,” he reports. “I work really well in the morning, for some reason, when I’m still in this unconscious state.”
In a way, too, his visual art is a way of dreaming into existence objects and interiors that he wishes he could find in the physical world. Given that he dresses in natural fibres and newsboy caps, plays a well-worn acoustic guitar, and prefers antique Polaroid cameras to the cellphone’s basilisk gaze, it’s no wonder that The Ballad of Ariel Quintet and Deacon D Kane’s miniature studios could have been located in a B. Traven or Jack Black flophouse, or that other works use design elements that appear to have been lifted from dogeared Theosophical tracts.
“Part of it,” House explains, “is my love of rummaging through attics and flea markets, hence the ‘Museum of the Mind’ title. There’s an element to it of creating things that I would hope to come across in that museum. And, yeah, some of them are going to have the appearance of found objects, but in actuality most everything is meticulously handmade.
“I mean, it’s taken two-and-a-half years to make this body of work,” he adds.
Despite this hard labour, House appreciates that he’s been able to make at least some of his ideal world visible—and that makes us lucky, too.
Detail shot of Kevin House’s 8 x 11-inch diorama The Ballad of Ariel Quintet (who presumably destroyed all of their paintings), made using wood, cardboard, clay, and paint. Photo courtesy of @kevinhousestudio on Instagram
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