Giuseppe Pietroniro at Fondazione Olivetti

Residential furnishings concern Italian artist Giuseppe Pietroniro. It's as if "home," the bedrock of Italian lifestyle, were meant to be upset by his work. In an exhibition called "In_Stability," organized by the Rome-based curatorial team 1:1 for the nonprofit space Fondazione Olivetti, Pietroniro presented two walls, a mirror and a door, all slightly askew.

In his past exhibitions, domesticity has repeatedly been called into question. Pietroniro has created houses on wheels (a silver camper at Torino's Fondazione Re Rebaudengo) and shown photographic portraits of shanties; in his signature "room portraits," he photographs the room (without furniture) that the image itself is to be hung in. For the Olivetti show, the destabilizing mechanism was, literally, motion. A large white-framed mirror was hung slightly above and parallel to the floor; hidden pivots made it possible for viewers to tilt it up and down. Two freestanding walls, papered in kitsch patterns from the '70s and hung with maudlin art reproductions, were set on rockers. These, too, could be activated by the spectator. The door swung separately to and fro, as if to create disorientation in even that which seems most familiar.

There's a long modern tradition of artists finding the uncanny in home decor, from Duchamp's famously unstable door to Magritte's disturbing interiors. In recent decades, Claes Oldenburg, Richard Artschwager, Robert Gober and Gregor Schneider have all similarly explored the weirdness of home furnishings. But in an Italian's hands, even one born in Toronto like Pietroniro, furniture seems particularly unsettling. Given Italy's strong tradition of commercial design--the notion of style itself is in some sense a national patrimony-any presentation there of domestic objects seems almost a comment on the country's cultural identity. Indeed, Pietroniro says that his current work draws on Jean Baudrillard's essay "Le systeme des objets," which addresses the way in which objects, especially when isolated, speak volubly about the culture they are conceived in. Possibly, as the exhibition's characteristically melancholy title suggests, "In_Stability" is also a reflection on the fragile state of living and creating art in one of Europe's ailing economies.

The exhibition will travel to Southern Italy, to the Galleria Civica di Montevergine in Siracusa, and has been realized with the help of Galleria Maze of Torino. Torino and Siracusa are notoriously opposed culturally, being in the extreme North and South of Italy. Pietroniro's exhibition is a stage set that comments, in silently rocking fragments, on the discomfort of place. It is an apt symbol for a nation founded in the late 19th century and, unbeknownst to most tourists, still far from comfortable with its political and cultural unity.

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