Ladies and Gentlemen: Kevin House

Unhappy in Happyland

The title of Kevin House’s new show – tonight, that is May 6, 2010 at the Red Gate Gallery at 156 West Hastings Street at Cambie – is telling. It’s the grouping title, you could say, of a whole group of strange and wonderful pieces that House has done about Vancouver at some unspecified point in its just-pre-Modernity. What House has going on here are a number of developed back stories – of singers, performers, side show freaks and assorted other demi-tragedies of a more innocent era – that have been extruded through his imagination and into his latest (greatest, weirdest) form: the painted and miniaturely sculpted 78 record.

House does not alway fully explain these back stories – why, for example, the rooming house bed so lovingly recreated in miniature on one 78, has a tiny open razor blade laying on its sheets – but each art work may be freighted with story by its owner. And this is my experience, exactly what does happen when you own one of these haunted jewels.

House is part Joe Coleman, part Eugene Von Bruenchenheim, part Joseph Cornell, part carnie and entirely himself.

If you’re in Vancouver, come out to this show. House will be there and I encourage you to ask him directly: Kevin, what does it mean?

Because I think he may know.