Anthony Lepore and Michael Henry Hayden at Del Vaz Projects

The Green Curtain (2017) (installation view). Image courtesy of the artists and Del Vaz Projects.

People keep telling me that I need to meet these guys. I suspect that this has much to do with the admirably high regard in which their social circle holds them. Continuing in a recent string of collaborations, including a show at Left Field in November 2016, Lepore and Hayden’s lives and work continue to entangle evermore (both shared a studio for a time in Lepore’s father’s bikini factory). Their most recent exhibition, The Green Curtain, at Del Vaz Projects, serves as another, brief pitstop along this shared trajectory.

At Del Vaz, a cozy, spacious apartment-gallery run by Jay Nayssan on the Westside, Lepore and Hayden’s work comprises two bedrooms. One houses a bevy of green ombré tinted, oversized tomato cages (Heavy Fruit, 2017), the other a portion of wooden fence, laid on its back and curving up and into the room like a wave. The title The Green Curtain refers to The Wizard of Oz, yet also calls to mind what Osbert Lancaster coined “Jungle-Jungle” in his idiosyncratic glossary of architectural style, Here, Of All Places (1958). “Jungle-Jungle” is characterized by the encroaching and over-application of plants, both exotic and ordinary, throughout architectural interiors, and the corresponding interior structures that are meant to both accommodate them and disappear amidst the spectacle of full bloom.

Lepore and Hayden’s Heavy Fruit sits in anticipation of vines. Their arrangement forces a narrow, department store-like pathway through, as one mentally attempts to adjust to the competing predispositions to both steady a familiar object, and to not knock over an artwork. There seems a certain denial of domesticity at work here—tacit utility and teetering form over the familiar, quotidian comfort of a bed, or even a chair. But the domestic lingers, inescapably, as context, and it’s not entirely clear whether to turn to domesticity or sparseness of form in our quest for meaning.

Another nearly-bare bedroom, this one containing a twin bed, houses the curving, wooden fence piece, (1719 14th St. [Reclining], 2017). Lepore and Hayden’s fence pieces (another preceded at the Left Field show)—in which they replace a stranger’s fence with a new one and reclaim the original, weather-beaten fence into an exhibition space—cede formal transformation to contextual trickery, like Doug Aitken filming a horse in a hotel room. ¹ The curving fence taking over one of the bedrooms at Del Vaz brings a half-hearted eeriness to a domestic interior, in part due to issues of scale—the domestic, by necessity, is scaled to everyday life. An exterior fence is exterior usually because it is large, and in some sense formidable, rather than cozy or inviting. The shape of Lepore and Hayden’s curve is not quite enough to envelop, though its faceted form alludes to architectural enclosure, and perhaps, in a more distant sense, to garmentry.

The fence represents less a curtain to be drawn aside than a static object serving to perpetuate a boundary. Lepore and Hayden’s fences are made to fail at their intended function and, in its absence, perform a transformative, rather than delineative, purpose. The results are reductive, perhaps to a fault—each piece quietly evokes, and silence can be both meaningful and irritating.

Both the fence and the tomato cages occupy a curious position here, and not only within Lepore and Hayden’s increasingly shared aesthetic language of process, function, form, and support. As these pieces occupy an interior space, designed for living (though both yearn for the backyard), Lepore and Hayden’s work here also conjures interweaving veins of domesticity, intimacy, and classism. The prized proximity of seeing artwork in a bedroom, by appointment, rather than in a traditional gallery space with public hours, strikes as both democratic and chic. The tasteful, spacious apartment housing the minimal, spatial work of Lepore and Hayden sits in a rather well-to-do zip code—gentle breezes from the not-too-distant ocean rustle the vineless tomato cages.

The Green Curtain, then, might be most usefully categorized as a brief, slight iteration on themes already present in Hayden  and Lepore’s own aesthetic chronology. There is a direct line to be drawn from the campy, domestic noir of Henry Hayden’s show, Knock Knock, at ACME last year (a piece from this series hangs in Nayssan’s living room) to the curving, tilted suburban yard enclosure at Del Vaz. Similarly, one may link the body-centeredness of Lepore’s photographs of the fabric and seamstress tables of his father’s bikini factory at Ghebaly Gallery in 2015 to the implied boning and curvilinear forms of the painted tomato cages. Lepore and Hayden might still be finding a language befitting to both—for now, their collaborative work remains tentative, though delicate in its effects.

This review was originally published in Carla issue 9.

The Green Curtain (2017) (installation view). Image courtesy of the artists and Del Vaz Projects.

The Green Curtain (2017) (installation view). Image courtesy of the artists and Del Vaz Projects.

Aaron Horst is a writer and architect based in Los Angeles. He has written for Carla, Art Review, and Flash Art.

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