Kayce Bayer

RECOMMENDED

Kayce Bayer and Kristin Miller Hopkins’ show at the ARC is titled “Home Page,” and the work sensitively embodies modes of habitation as it uncannily performs the kinds of interactivity and embedded layering that characterize a tricked-out website. Bayer and Hopkins are clearly engaged in conversation, and their pieces are strongly complementary. Bayer’s delicate diorama-like boxes of interior and exterior spaces are animated by a series of gears/automata that make virtual rainfalls and moving clouds, with an especially beautiful snowing machine. These pieces are presented with small drawings of homes and landscapes, and with a stop-animation video of her weather systems to create a multimedia system that’s richly embodied if borderline-precious.

Kristin Miller Hopkins

Hopkins’ contribution is similarly multifaceted, focusing on a more conceptual mapping of marriage and home, most strikingly with her book “Homestellations” that layers architectural blueprints with abstract digital photos that betray her obsession with space and surface. Hopkins’ “Marriage Maps,” heavily collaged canvases that resemble quilting blocks, combine stitching, pins and fabric with measuring materials and hand-drawn maps—even more delicate depictions of imagined worlds and how one might represent them. Slightly less interesting are Hopkins’ found slides that she’s damaged and weathered, creating seemingly decaying surfaces of images that are more ominous than thought-provoking. Overall, though, the experience of the show is more playful than dark, and it speaks intelligently to changing notions of home, when the word now evokes equal parts domesticity and the opening page of a web browser. (Monica Westin)

Through July 18 at ARC Gallery, 832 W. Superior St. #204