Haunting House
Haunting House is a group exhibition featuring the artwork of Daniel Klaas Beckwith, Matthew McGaughey, and Alex Stevens. Together, the three LA-based artists mount an immersive pop-up installation of sculptures, video, and augmented-found objects. The resulting exhibition conjures the symbolic residues of domestic life, as well as the radiating power relationships that domesticity engenders. Visitors will find the warehouse-turned-gallery transformed into a domestic haunt, where carpets and curtains bubble up from demolished walls and floating beds. McGaughey’s quasi-silicon constructions evoke a domestic space in the midst of renovation.Pocketed within these false walls, McGaughey stages filmed vignettes with masked facsimiles of the celebrity home renovation duo, Chip and Joanna Gaines. Alex Stevens continues to draw out the uncanny connections between pop iconography, religious extremism, and the home—bringing together the strange interlocutors of Justin Bieber, Jesus Christ, and Heaven’s Gate. Daniel Klass Beckwith’s camouflaged assemblages of rubbish are a noticeable departure from McGaughey’s and Stevens’s bombastic visions of domestic terror. In their quiet incongruity, however, Klass Beckwith’s quiet sculptures gesture to a patchwork of invisible norms that underscore the strange realities of living in close quarters.
Presented as an entangled installation, the artworks found within Haunting House strike a chord that is at once familiar and dissonant. While showcasing unique research methods and material investigations, Klaas Beckwith, McGaughey, and Stevens find harmony in their collective interrogation of the home, using its most ubiquitous symbols and fixtures.
Link To Essay
November 8 ‑ November 24, 2024
Daniel Klaas Beckwith, Matthew McGaughey, and Alex Stevens
In collaboration with Jamison Edgar
All images: Allen Hung-Lun Chen