Kelly Kaczynski

For this exhibition, the five large bay doors of the Hyde Park Art Center open onto a theater that is latent with cataclysmic shift. Two stages, each supporting an approximate rendition of Vladimir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, 1919, face off in a modernist showdown with uncertain consequences. These mountainous pylons, constructed from building-grade materials (lumber, luan, drywall expanding foam), mirror one another from their individual platforms. But unlike the sturdy (if cursory) towers, the stages’ surfaces present a more refined wood surface, beneath which a large-scale pulley system lies exposed. Visitors to the art center are invited to climb onto the twin stages and pull on ropes to set in motion a tug-of-war that could literally reconfigure the tall, spiraled framing and metaphorically redefine the social order that the Third International represented. Kelly Kaczynski’s elaborate installation shrewdly references the politically charged elements inherent to modernist architecture and structuralist set design, yet the work also evokes tectonic plate movement and other geological forces. Along the gallery wall opposite the street, she has installed a length of bleachers from which viewers can contemplate the sculptural form or observe others’ manual labor in impromptu contests of strength and determination. Regardless of how physically gripping these contraptions are, it is the performative nature of the work—and the agency of people to foster change for themselves—that is at the heart of this aspect of her ongoing conceptual project titled “Olympus Manger.”