UW Professor Uncovers the Life of Everyday Objects

Do you fill your house with telephones? Your cabinets with makeup? Why?

Laurie Beth Clark, a professor of art, will explore those and other questions through a new site-specific installation, “The Everyday Life of Objects.”

Rendered as a 1,500-square-foot floor-to-ceiling maze recalling urban architecture, the installation will include window frames, high-heeled shoes, hammers, spray paint cans, toilets, Barbie dolls and other objects.

Clark says the public will have several opportunities to participate directly in the exhibition. Attendees will be able to claim objects from the collection. Chosen inventory may be claimed at a closing reception, Nov. 30 from noon to 6 p.m.

Clark also has set up a telephone voice-mail system – at 258-8550 – for reflection on the role objects play in callers’ lives.

“I am as interested in absent-minded accrual as I am in self-conscious selection,” she says. “I’d like to talk with ‘yuppies’ whose instinct to acquire is at odds with a contemporary ‘bourgeois’ minimalist decorating aesthetic.”

Clark traces her interest in what she calls “the aesthetics of the mundane” to about 1984. A native of New York City, she has lived in Madison since 1985.

“The Everyday Life of Objects” will be open every day until Nov. 30 in Suite 206 of the Madison Enterprise Center, an incubator space for new businesses and artists. The center, located at 100 S. Baldwin St., is open Monday-Friday, 10 a.m.-8 p.m.; Saturday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; and Sunday, noon-6 p.m.