James G Exhibition Review: Re-Building at Vox Populi

For their October exhibition, the Vox Populi gallery in Philadelphia showed Leah Bailis’s cardboard sculpture titled “Re-Building”. Painted white and made to resemble siding on a suburban style house, there are several cut out sections of siding that are assembled on top of each other. The fragmented sections are assembled to reference a house, with a triangle top and several breaks in the sections that reference doors and windows. The structure of the cardboard sections is also visible, which further reinforces ideas about construction. These construction references made me think about Gordon Matta-Clark house cuts in a weird way, while he was perfectly deconstructing houses, Leah Bailis seems to be imperfectly constructing them.

Tall and narrow, the structure is clearly not intended for use, actually acting more like a prison cell than a house. The siding and the house shape are clearly referencing suburbia, but not necessarily in an appealing way. The success of the work lies in the subtle reference to city life: the block forms, the segmented parts, and the narrow frame. The work brings up questions abut the differences between city and suburban life, and the viewer is forced to make their own conclusion about which is more desirable.