Find Unforgettable Art In A Most Unlikely Place: APittsburgh Mattress Factory

Chiharu Shiota takes over an entire townhouse for her 2013 work Trace of Memory. It's one of themany unusual installations at The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh.

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Chiharu Shiota takes over an entire townhouse for her 2013 work Trace of Memory. It's one of themany unusual installations at The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh.

Courtesy of The Mattress Factory

The Mattress Factory hasn't been an actual mattress factory for a while now. Built on a hillside inthe Central Northside neighborhood of Pittsburgh, back at the turn of the last century, it was usedas a warehouse and showroom for Stearns & Foster until the 1960s.

Today, it's one of the country's more unusual art museums. Filled not with paintings or sculptures --and certainly not with mattresses -- it is now, four stories of ... well, of "stories" in a way.Installations that take you places you don't expect to go in an art museum.

Benjamin Sota's Damn everything but the circus, 2014, includes a circus tent, two tight-wires,canvas, carnival bulbs, fiberglass, steel, pipe, carnival lighting, German wheel, video, papier-ma?che? masks and bungee cords.

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Benjamin Sota's Damn everything but the circus, 2014, includes a circus tent, two tight-wires,canvas, carnival bulbs, fiberglass, steel, pipe, carnival lighting, German wheel, video, papier-ma?che? masks and bungee cords.

Courtesy of The Mattress Factory

A recent fourth-floor exhibit called Damn everything but the circus, for instance, was inspired by anE.E. Cummings poem that reads "damn everything that is grim, dull, motionless, unrisking, inwardturning, damn everything that won't get into the circle, that won't enjoy." Artist and Zany UmbrellaCircus founder Ben Sota arranged a canvas-draped, room-sized installation where visitors could walk

a very low tightrope, drape themselves on a trapeze, even roll around in one of those giant metalacrobat wheels.

Across the hall is Ryder Henry's Diaspora, a futuristic city-in-miniature (with one house smallenough that you could hold it in your hand, that opened to reveal its furnishings including a tinymirror that reduced the viewer to the right scale) and what looked like a space station recedingtoward the next galaxy.

Diaspora, 2014 by Ryder Henry is "a transition zone between the earthbound city and outer spacehabitation."

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Diaspora, 2014 by Ryder Henry is "a transition zone between the earthbound city and outer spacehabitation."

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Also on this level, in a locked room, there's a permanent exhibit -- Sarah Oppenheimer's oddly titled610-3356 -- a molded plywood-sheathed hole in the floor that lets you see straight out the side of thebuilding one floor below. For some reason, birds don't fly in. The museum keeps the room locked sokids won't fall out.

Sarah Oppenheimer's 2008 610-3356 is an opening -- or as she calls it, a "wormhole" -- in the galleryfloor.

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Sarah Oppenheimer's 2008 610-3356 is an opening -- or as she calls it, a "wormhole" -- in the galleryfloor.

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Other permanent exhibits include Yayoi Kusama's pair of mirrored, polka-dotted rooms that give newmeaning to the notion of infinity for anyone who steps inside them; the hauntingly exquisite lightsculptures of James Turrell; and Greer Lankton's heartbreaking It's all about ME, Not You, which, inre-creating her bedroom, offers a window into this transgender artist's struggles with addiction andanorexia.

Greer Lankton recreated her Chicago apartment in It's all about ME, not you, 2009.

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Tom Little/Courtesy of The Mattress Factory

All of these are examples of "site-specific installation art," meaning art that's tied to the space it's in,and it's the only thing you'll find at The Mattress Factory now, though that was not true when thebuilding began its new life in 1977.

Visitors standing inside Yayoi Kusama's 1996 mirrored room Repetitive Vision experiencemannequins and polka dots, as far as the eye can see.

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Visitors standing inside Yayoi Kusama's 1996 mirrored room Repetitive Vision experiencemannequins and polka dots, as far as the eye can see.

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"We opened a food co-op on the first floor, with vegetarian cooking," remembers Mattress Factoryfounder Barbara Luderowski. "People just came. Everybody says, 'You had great vision' and so on.The hell I did. It was an evolutionary process, built originally on desire for myself: a place to work, aplace to live, and a community in which I could thrive as a person."

Others thrived there, too, including a young artist whose work was included in the first crop of site-specific installations: Michael Olijnyk, who's now co-director of the museum.

"He always refers to himself as the nightmare dinner guest who never went home," chucklesLuderowski.

James Turrell manipulates light in his 1983 installation Dana.

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James Turrell manipulates light in his 1983 installation Dana.

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Today, "going home" just means going upstairs. The two co-directors share a huge open living spaceon the top two floors of the museum, and preside jointly over an arts complex that now includes themain building plus artists' residences and workshop areas in several other buildings.

One of them -- a three-story Victorian townhouse down the street -- has been taken over by whatOlijnyk says is "literally miles of black yarn" for Trace of Memory, an enormous, townhouse-fillingspiderweb of sorts created by Berlin-based artist Chiharu Shiota.

"We wanted her to do the whole building," explains Olijnyk, "so this idea is in the whole building, sowhen the visitors are coming, they're opening door by door and finding this piece."

It took 13 people 10 days to create Shiota's Trace of Memory.

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It took 13 people 10 days to create Shiota's Trace of Memory.

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What they're finding is basically three floors' worth of memory befogged. The installation makes theobjects in the rooms hard to focus on: A bed, a pile of suitcases, a wedding dress that floats in mid-air, all rendered fuzzy and indistinct by hundreds of angled, irregular strands of yarn stretched wallto wall.

"It took 13 people 10 days," marvels Olijnyk. "And when they said 10 days we thought, 'No way,'because we saw them working on one room and it was very, very labor-intensive. But they wouldstart early in the morning, and sometimes work until 2 in the morning, then get up the next day anddo the same thing."

The effect of their labors, and the latticework of black yarn they've created, is that you see thiscentury-old rooming house through a haze of memory ... an effect that had special resonance for oneattendee.

"Someone came and visited us," says Olijnyk, "who was actually born on the second floor. And whenhe walked down the steps -- you see those three brass mailboxes? -- his mother moved into thebuilding in 1932 and her name is still penciled in on that brass mailbox."

Trace of Memory, like many of the Mattress Factory's installations, is a complicated idea, renderedin spare, minimalist form. That contrasts with the directors' private residence, up above themuseum, which is wildly maximalist, crammed with thousands of objects the two have collected --Luderowski's tchotchke-filled cabinets (including dozens of 1930s Mickey Mice (artisanal figures

created from patterns that ran in Vogue magazine), Olijnyk's midcentury modern furniture.

"Living with him is a little like having Christmas all the time," says Luderowski. "He brings homethese treasures."

Treasures that he's artfully arranged with acurator's eye. Her treasures tend towardthe hand-crafted ... the worn and lived-with.

"I can't afford top-of-the-line," she explains."If I were a doll collector, you'd be after theperfect dress, the perfect shoes, the perfectmechanics and so on. I love the mechanics, Idon't give a damn about the exteriorparticularly. I look for bargains, I look forbroken, which I can readily repair and it

gives me that hands-on thing again."

"Again" because Luderowski and Olijnyk are artists, not just arts administrators -- devoted enough tosite-specific creativity, that they live atop their own creation: this beehive of artistic activity.

"I love being even a peripheral part of the actual process," says Luderowski. "The thinking process,the flexibility, and the problem solving, and all those things which to me are so important in terms ofwhat art does for you."

That's why the four floors below their apartment are devoted to art that is collaborative andinteractive, that asks artists to respond to the space they're given -- whether with fogs of memory ordo-it-yourself circuses -- and that asks visitors to inhabit the art, not just look at it.

"One of the reasons we decided on doing installation art, both of us, was 'pedestal art' was a limitingthing to do, and installation really involves different mediums: some sound, building wombs out ofwax, a variety of materials and challenges that ... " Luderowski pauses just a second, "makes my lifericher."

And, with any luck, the lives of those who venture into Pittsburgh's Mattress Factory.

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