May 2013: Glasshouse

Glasshouse
246 Union Avenue
Brooklyn, NY 11211

By Lauren Xandra

The newly reopened domestic and exhibition/performance space of Lital Doyon Dotan and Eval Eyal Perry, called Glasshouse, contains within an overwhelming amount of concurrent dialogue and duality between utilitarian objects and art memorabilia. From the one-hundred or so refrigerator magnets bearing a photographic nude portrait of Lital, to the video installations projecting up and out from their trash cans, kitchen pots, coffee mugs, and bathtub; their intricately-curated live-in gallery is nothing short of fantastical. The sound-scape and décor of Glasshouse is a conglomeration of video, photographic, and text-based documentation of past performances. Glasshouse, a container name for founders Lital Doyon Dotan and Eyal Eyal Perry’s evolving domestic and exhibition/performance space, alludes to the transparent defining features of their creative praxis: observation, experimentation, and a prioritizing of presence in art.


Glasshouse has undergone various physical transformations—first existing solely as a web presence, then as a live-in gallery in Tel Aviv, next as of San Francisco-based collaborations with Marina Abramovic, a temporary autonomy in art institute in San Francisco, by invitation from Marina Abramovic and lastly, in its’ Williamsburg form as we now know it. Its’ exhibition calendar is determined by a rotating roster of resident artists selected by Lital and Eyal Eyal via application or invitation. Local artists are welcome to perform at glasshouse as part of the monthly program. space as residents are representative of the specific artistic outlook of Glasshouse.

The next exhibition/performance at the gallery is “If I Were” directed and performed by Amanda Hunt and Alex Romania. The two creative partners began this project with a question that started with, “If I were ____” and was followed by “would you still ____?” They first toyed with these questions two years ago, but it was not until this past fall that these questions developed into a series of assignments directly related to the body, gender, and sexuality. They responded to these assignments instinctually and across mediums, stringing them together conceptually in the way one might hang a series of paintings.

These assignments made larger issues of identity tangible by directly dealing with the microscopic and the material. This is not unlike artists/Glasshouse founders Lital and Eval’ Eyal’s interest in made-functional ideas. Alex Romania describes this shift in attention from ethereal concepts to examined personal aspects as influenced by Burroughs’ cut-up method of tearing apart what is assumed as common sense—a method introduced to him by Genesis P-Orridge whom he performed with at MoMA PS1 in September, when this project took flight. For Amanda Hunt, the resulting central focus of the evening-length performance is on “everything here,” she says, using her fingers to draw a circle between her and Alex—their legs the secants intercepting this gap. She describes this space as a container: the holding space for a newly resultant understanding.