Brian Slattery Photo
Meg Bloom.
From the title of Meg Bloom’s and Howard el-Yasin’s collaborative exhibit, “Within These Walls” — up now at City Gallery on Upper State Street until Sept. 30 — you might be forgiven for thinking of a certain border wall that may or may not yet be built.
“But it’s not just the Trump wall,” Bloom said, when asked about the concept behind the show. Current politics are just a small part of the installation, which dives instead into the much bigger concept of “thinking about barriers that are supposed to work,” Bloom said — and don’t quite. Whether it’s the border wall, the levees in New Orleans, or the walls people build around themselves that keep us apart.
The larger theme asserts itself as soon as you enter City Gallery, as Bloom and el-Yasin have built a wall that, if you’re not careful, you’ll walk right into. It reconfigures the gallery space. The exhibit isn’t installed in the gallery; it seems to grow out of it.
Bloom and el-Yasin are both sculptors, and “I love thinking about using the whole space as a sculpture,” Bloom said.
Bloom and el-Yasin have also built their installation largely from repurposed packing materials — the delivery boxes we get in the mail, the plastic containers we get our food in. Using these containers was part of the concept from the start. El-Yasin already had a small collection of them, and when they agreed that using them was the way to go, they saved their own containers and collected more from a handful of people over a couple months. They accumulated containers faster than they expected — “symbolic of our materialism and our culture,” Bloom said wryly.
They worked in their studios making structures from their chosen materials and found them tough going.
“We had a terrible time,” Bloom said. The glue holding the plastic together kept failing. The process became part of the art. “Everything became a metaphor. The walls kept tumbling down.” The reflective surfaces reflected the themes, “the chaos of our crumbling infrastructure,” Bloom added, while we just keep gathering waste.
“We’ve made a mess out of things. It’s not just Trump,” Bloom said. In time they decided to build directly in the gallery space — and clearly had some fun doing it.
Because “Within These Walls” isn’t just a lecture or a political harangue. There’s a sense of play throughout the entire piece, of exploration, even of fun.
“I’m someone who has walked around the world photographing walls,” Bloom said, whether it’s ice walls on the side of a frozen hill, or rock walls covered in lichen, or walls criss-crossed with “the skeletons of vines … I love seeing when there’s a piece missing. I love seeing the internal structure.” Her fascinating extension to the manmade environment, too — like the concrete and rebar patterns in the construction sites all over town.
“The beautiful parts of walls usually have little to do with why they get built,” she said, “or what their function ends up being.”
That ambiguity suffuses the exhibit, as the walls feel both confining and fragile. They hem you in, yet you’re worried about bumping into them for fear of knocking them over, especially because you’re in an art gallery. The textures that Bloom and el-Yasin had built into their creation cry out to be touched. But you know you can’t do it.
“Is it a shanty? Is it a shelter?” Bloom asked. “Or is it something that has a pretext for protecting us, but is a disaster” when it fails?
Though not just a disaster. As you contemplate what might happen if the walls were to all fall away, the question arises as to what would be left. A debris field, surely. But also, an empty space to build something new. Or maybe — at least for a little while — not build anything at all, and instead revel in the freedom, the sense of wild possibility, after the walls between us were gone and the borders erased.
“Within These Walls” runs at City Gallery, 994 State St., through Sept. 30. Visit its website for hours and more information.