Ian Kiaer: Tooth House
Henry Moore Institute, Leeds
20 March – 22 June 2014
For his landmark solo exhibition at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, ‘Tooth House’, Ian Kiaer repurposes debris to create props and proposals for perceiving objects in space, asking questions of value and form.
Kiaer uses discarded and humble materials, such as packing foam, chocolate wrappers, Perspex sheets abandoned in the street and standard-sized paper. These materials he cajoles and seduces into artworks in his studio, using titles as tools to tune his sculptural environments. Each title holds a specific connection to a project by a thinker who made radical proposals for understanding interactions with natural and technological environments.
‘Tooth House’ brings together a selection of Kiaer’s works made between 2005 and 2014, the most recent created in response to the galleries of the Henry Moore Institute. The exhibition title is taken from the work of the architect and designer Frederick Kiesler (1890-1965), whose exhibition designs and building proposals sought to unify lived experience with structures for organising the world. Kiesler’s 1942 landmark exhibition design for Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery worked with three-dimensional space as a total environment, creating a continuous space for encountering art. Kiesler’s Tooth House was a scheme designed in the late 1940s for a residence integrated into its environment, modelled on a tooth - that part of the body that grows twice and is a constant reminder of our primordial past.