Conway & Pratt at the Vault Building - New Bedford, Massachusetts - Review of Exhibitions

Art in America, Dec, 1994 by Ann Wilson Lloyd

Vintage bank buildings, especially in small towns, seem to exude patriarchal authority. The New York installation/performance team Conway & Pratt cashed in on this with their recent project Too Close to Home, An Exploration of "Daddy's Little Girl." The piece was sited throughout a vacant century-old structure that was originally a bank and is slated to become an art museum. (A 1991 Conway a Pratt installation in New York inaugurated the, raw-space basement of the SoHo Guggenheim.)

Too Close to Home consisted of a series of tableaux probing the father/daughter relationship, which were concentrated in small rooms on the second floor. To get there, one fought through a cloud of fluffy little dresses hanging in the stairwell, an exercise both vaguely annoying and dreamlike. Abundant ruffles set the mood for an experience that was, by turns, nostalgic, poignant, silly and unsettling, with the occasional live performer imparting voyeuristic frisson. Through one barricaded doorway, for instance, viewers saw a woman imprisoned in a relentlessly pink, doll-strewn child's bedroom. She sat in a chair on top of the bed, sifting salt onto her feet and gazing, transfixed, just beyond the viewers. In the halls connecting the rooms were heaps of family and childhood memorabilia, much of it brought in by local residents and loaned to the artists for the run of the show - diaries, prom dresses, toys, lots of photos. Handwritten notes, authentic or not, injected convincing bits of reality. ("Just after my father died, I found his last pack of Lucky Strikes. I went into his closet, leaned against his coats and smoked the whole pack.")

One room held a mound of guy-stuff - fishing poles, neckties, shirts, tools - all topped by a battered recliner chair. It was both a larger-than-life monument to the mystique of paternal maleness and a sad reminder of how that aura diminishes over the years. Other rooms alluded amusingly to puberty's embarrassments, wedding fantasies, little-girl horse mania and, just when viewers were most off guard, to the lifelong aftermath of sexual abuse. This last was presented via a stunning live performance behind a peep-show screen. Viewers were instructed to drop a penny in a slot, which triggered both the screen and performer - a distraught, slip-clad woman sitting on a bed who repeatedly screamed "no, no, no," until the screen slid shut and silenced her.

All was accompanied by overlapping live and recorded voices and music, most notably that of singer Nora York, whose torchy, throaty voice delivered a continuous repertoire of "Daddy," songs. Like the installation as a whole, she wrung every drop of emotional juice from this bitter-sweet, complex and highly fraught familial bond.