Museum artwork has sound appeal

You have to approach the artwork in the Mattress Factory Museum in Pittsburgh with an open mind. And for the current exhibit called Visual Sound, it wouldn't hurt to have your ears peeled and your eyes wide open. Or is it the other way around?
To appreciate the current exhibitions, visitors need to understand the context of the organization. The Mattress Factory is a research and development lab for artists, the mission statement explained.
"As a museum of contemporary art, it commissions new site specific works, presents them to the widest possible audience, and maintains selected individual installations in a growing and distinctive permanent collection. Professional artists, at varying stages of their careers, experiment with ideas and materials within an integrated residency and exhibition program."
Where it is: Located in the Mexican War Streets neighborhood on the North Side of Pittsburgh, the Mattress Factory has been turning heads since it opened in 1977. The organization has renovated six properties in the area to create exhibition galleries, an artistic garden, artists' residences and office space.
According to a history provided by the museum, Italian immigrants settled in the neighborhood of what is now the Mattress Factory in the late 1800s and early 1900s. On the site where the garden now stands, was a four-story brick building constructed in the 1890s for the Italo-French Macaroni Company. In 1900, a six-story addition was constructed, which now houses the Mattress Factory. According to a long-time neighborhood resident, macaroni was manufactured in the four-story building and dried in the six-story section. The macaroni company moved out of these buildings to another North Side location around 1930.
The buildings were vacant for much of the 1930s but were used to store and sort clothing and other materials for relief for victims of the 1936 St. Patrick's Day flood. In the late 1930s,
Varied history: The Gorman Candy Company occupied the six-story building. The paper company was housed in the four story building and burned down in 1963.
The six-story building had various occupants. It became a mattress factory in the 1960s. In 1971, current director and artist Barbara Luderowski purchased the building to live in and create an art studio. At one time the building was home to a vegetarian food co-op. The organization became non-profit in 1977 and in 1982 decided to only show commissions of new works.
Currently, about 27,000 visitors, including student groups, tour the facility annually. This year "Visual Sounds" Part I and II occupies most of the exhibition space. Visual sound is one of the largest sound exhibitions of new work presented in the United States. Nine artistic works give visitors a comprehensive experience, according to Michael Olijnuk, who co-curated the exhibit with Rolf Juilius, a sound artist who has works in the Mattress Factory's permanent collection.
Making a point: For example, Qin Yufen, a Chinese artist, unwound 5.7 miles of barbed wire and reconfigured it into a giant room-sized tangle of loops. "Beautiful Violence" has red, yellow, blue and green latex party balloons somehow squeezed in between the ragged wires. Just when you are trying to interpret the artist's message, you notice a disturbing sound emanating from the ceiling. It's Yufen's original composition of balloons being rubbed together combined with the sound of a Chinese bamboo flute.
In another installation by American Terry Fox, you'll find nine ordinary glass bottles of various sizes and shapes specifically placed on the wooden floor to create "Bottled Air." A plastic tube from an aquarium pump connects to a bottle. When the pump is activated a different pitch is created from the combination of air and shape of each piece of glass.
In the basement, visitors put on earphones to listen and observe German artist Christina Kubisch's "Red Wall/Blue Wall" installation. She used a hot glue gun to attach red wire to one side of the room and blue wire to the opposite wall. The wires follow the brick foundation wall patterns. Visitors can create their own cacophony of sounds by simply moving around the room. Natural sounds are heard from the red side and machine-made sounds like computer and laser printers are heard on the blue side. Each pass through space produces a different mix of sounds. It's amusing to see people's reactions to the process.
Garden respite: Take the elevator up one level and out into the light to walk around the garden, created from the burned out foundation of the macaroni building. By the time Winifred Lutz began work on her permanent outdoor garden installation in 1993, she had already studied the site for five years. She used the information she had uncovered -- both historical and physical -- to design a garden that responded to and incorporated the history and attributes of the site.
The gardens occupy three-quarters of an acre. During the summer, tall grass encloses a single chair. The entryway from the parking lot has a trellis made from huge wooden beams. Water flows through a concrete canal. Stones from a Pennsylvania quarry are specifically placed among flowers and trees.
About a block away on 1414 Monterey Street, another renovated building houses the work of French artist Patrice Carre who recreated a scene from a Belgian comic book. Visitors can climb a short ladder to peer into a window of a music parlor decorated with double entendres of music and racing.
Upstairs, Japanese artist Takehisa Kosugi created two installations that use live sound. In Dual Quartet 2000, four plastic-glass tubes that contain small speakers hang from the ceiling. Each tube makes a separate sound, which corresponds with four small canvases that create light patterns.
Love or hate the exhibition, Valley visitors will have plenty of lively conversation for the ride home.