The Brooklyn Rail

Donna Dennis’s evocative—and marvelous—exhibition, Houses and Hotels, features five sculptures resembling old cabins, a rustic B + B, and a hotel façade, all scaled down, architectural relics from a bygone era. Installed in the darkened galleries of O’Flaherty’s in the East Village, itself an endangered architectural environment, the exhibition has a haunted atmosphere. We make our way through the galleries as if strolling along the sidewalk of an old, deserted town on the evening of a New Moon. Rather than architectural models or doll houses, the sculptures, dating from 1972 (Hotel Pacifico)—near the beginning of Dennis’s long career—to 1994 (Cataract Cabin), are made to human scale, that is, approximately six feet tall, or nearly eleven feet high in the case of Two Stories with Porch (for Robert Cobuzio) (1977-1979).

The words of the pioneering architecture critic Anthony Vidler came to mind as I made my way through the show. Writing about the bodily analogy in architecture in his influential 1994 book The Architectural Uncanny, Vidler, who died last October, observed, “In classical theory, the (idealized) body was, so to speak, directly projected onto the building, which both stood for it and represented its ideal perfection. The building derived its authority, proportional and compositional, from this body, and, in a complementary way, the building then acted to confirm and establish the body—social and individual—in the world.” Dennis projects herself and her history onto these meticulous constructions, which could be regarded as self-portraits. Through them, she explores a physical, personal, and emotional relationship with buildings recalled from her past.

Dennis reinforces the idea in her 2023 monograph, Donna Dennis: Poet in Three Dimensions. “I derived the scale of the work, which I use to this day, from my own body,” she writes. “The first hotel was sixty-eight inches tall and the top of the front door came to my eye level.” The backlit façade, Hotel Pacifica (1972), with its perforated white lattice trim, and narrow doorway, resembles the entrance to a rather humble beach resort. The Ohio-born, New York-based artist refers to these early façade works as shaped canvases; and in the context of Minimalism and other trends of the period, they can serve as excellent early examples of post-modern sculpture.

The façades evolved into more complex constructions—diorama-like structures with illuminated interiors and the barest suggestion of occupants. Two Stories with Porch (for Robert Cobuzio)—titled in honor of an artist-friend who died during the two years Dennis worked on the piece—is a recreation of a modest two-story guesthouse, corresponding to American vernacular architecture of the 1940s and ’50s, in the Midwest, and elsewhere. Neither grand nor abject, the homely structure has a ceiling-lit porch and a ground-floor window that bears a green neon “VACANCY” sign. It is an invitation for viewers to at least imagine booking a room in this rather melancholy inn.

A pioneering installation artist, Dennis conceived a pathway to guide viewers through this lonely, nocturnal stroll from house to house to arrive at Cataract Cabin (1993–94), situated in a rear gallery. Here, a diminutive, white-painted rural house is perched twelve feet high atop a dark wood and metal construction meant to resemble a granite boulder. This work was inspired by a tourist cabin Dennis saw in New Hampshire, as well as Jane Bowles’s short story “Camp Cataract,” set on a rocky cliff near a raging waterfall. Viewers approach this piece as if coming through a forest clearing to see the desolate house in the far distance. It is a dramatic finale to Dennis’s poignant nocturnal reveries.