As one enters the low-lit gallery at Art Coop, they are greeted by the sight of numerous burning candles, their rainbow-colored wax dripping from the various pieces of furniture throughout the room. A swath of black and white photos covers the walls, and in the corner, two pairs of ceramic underwear spin idly from the ceiling. It’s almost as if you’ve stepped through into a strange, but oddly familiar dream.
The recently opened art installation by artists Claire Daly and Olly Greer, entitled “encase you forgot,” is, in fact, not a dream, but reality. The three-dimensional collage of different sculptures and large-format photography has been carefully arranged to cultivate a specific viewing experience that invokes feelings of nostalgia.
“What is the tether to the past and now?” ask the words on the wall closest to the gallery’s entrance. “Together for the first time, Claire Daly and Olly Greer ask you to stay a while, sift with your eyes, and sort with your heart.”
Greer, a multidisciplinary artist who uses they/them pronouns, created all of the sculptural pieces in the installation. Most were made through bricolage, a process of collaging with objects.
“The objects that I’m using, if you look at them closely, (are) old toys,” Greer said. “All of the candles that I use are not purchased from Amazon. They’re from a garage sale or they’re from a thrift store or they’re from someone’s junk drawer and they were at dinner one night and they blew the candle out and now that candle becomes (mine) to use in this work.”
This “lineage of memory as material,” according to Greer, manifests itself in small mergings of yarn, ceramics, wax, paint and other random objects. These bricolages are imbued with their trans identity, which has required honoring the person that got Greer to where they are today.
One of Greer’s favorite pieces in the installation is the two pairs of ceramic underwear that hang above the candles on the wooden telephone bench. When lit, the heat causes the underwear to spin.
The piece is part of a larger project for Greer’s thesis titled “Dykesthetics.” Originally 30 pairs of underwear, Greer took two and collaged them with decals to make them look more “maximal” than they were for their thesis.
Alongside Greer’s colorful creations, Daly has displayed her black and white, large-format photography from her series, “Where the Spirits Got Stuck.” The collection is inspired by her work preparing houses for estate sales back in 2019.
“A lot of times, when I’m learning about the (estate sale) home or the homeowner, it’s just through the things they’ve left behind,” Daly said. “You’re kind of making assumptions or creating your own story. I realized that, (through) all the things that I was capturing, I was reconstructing places from my past.”
When Daly showed these photos to her mom, she pointed out different objects in the estate sale homes that triggered personal memories. Daly was intrigued by how someone could have memories of a place they had never been and soon began to see her childhood reflected in every home she entered.
Daly went from taking photos inside these estate sale homes to staging scenes in her childhood home that one would come across in an estate sale. One such photo shows her mom holding a picture of her grandpa.
“Our house is malleable and saturated in familial love,” Daly wrote in the exhibition catalog. “I listened to the home as it reminded me where my dad had passed away, where a shrine had been built in the basement, and which corner in the living room held the apparitions.”
Some of Daly’s prints are as large as 8 feet by 10 feet, covering most of the walls with architectural hauntings of the past.
Although distinct in color and size, Daly and Greer’s work plays off each other unexpectedly well, according to Hilary Pope, owner of Art Coop and the gallery.
“The visual styles together are something that I haven’t seen before,” Pope said. “I don’t know that either of them would have accomplished this alone, and together it’s created this environment that’s so different and beautiful.”
Pope was first approached by Daly, who hoped to display her photography in Art Coop’s gallery. When told that they don’t do solo shows, she reached out to Greer with the aim of collaboration.
Without Daly, Greer probably would not have had the opportunity to display their work in the gallery.
“There’s a sense of homemaking within that space,” Greer said. “There’s a lot of nods to domestication and the spaces we create around ourselves. I think that the contrast of (Daly’s) black and white with my maximalist colored objects really landed a push and pull within (that) narrative.”
Daly and Greer didn’t necessarily have a plan for the show. Greer had not even seen Daly’s prints before the week they were given to install their work in the space.
“It involved a lot of us trying and failing, and then trying again, and using Claire’s tactics of vinyl on the wall, and then my bricolages on top of her vinyl,” Greer said. “In the end, I feel like the installation became a 3D collage.”
Greer hopes that people who come to see the installation, which is open until Friday, will take a moment to remember and process their trauma.
“Take the time to talk to your (inner) six-year-old,” Greer said. “They’re inside of you, you know?”
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