Notice of Proposed Land Use Action
Consolidated Works, 860-5245.
Through July 8.

One of the comforting stories we tell ourselves about art is that it has the capacity to build beauty from adversity. This romantic trope has survived because it is at least in part true, never mind its annoying corollary–exempting art therapy–that you must suffer to do so. What presses hard on us makes us make better work.

This is demonstrated so beautifully at Consolidated Works’ Notice of Proposed Land Use Action that one almost forgets the show’s doomed premise: the impending destruction of the fine old building that houses it. This, to my mind, is proof of that old “art is stronger than pain” theory. ConWorks has been operating under a swinging pendulum since it opened in the fall of 1999, and its multiple stays of execution only (paradoxically) make this ending seem more sudden, although not, happily, final; the organization is currently negotiating a lease with a new space.

For this show, Visual Arts Director Meg Shiffler has commissioned site-specific works from 10 artists (and, not at all incidentally, paid the production costs for each). Site-specific, as you might guess, means that the work is made especially for the space that contains it, but in this case the artists took into consideration the fact of the space’s logical end. Not a single one of the results is obvious, not even the dual 700-pound wrecking balls installed by Dan Corson. With these enormous tools, viewers are invited to participate in the destruction of a drywall divider, an act whose sheer anarchism seems more fun than morbid. It would be nothing more than a one-liner, however, if the drywall itself were not wired so that when one or the other wrecking ball meets it, an amplified boom rolls through the gallery, in both rich low tones and metallic high ones. The result is an aural description of the space around you, a reminder that acoustics play as much of a part in the way you know a room as the parts you see.

Much of the show concentrates its view on the parts you can’t see, or the parts you wouldn’t think to look at, such as Matthew Picton’s detailed rendering, in transparent acrylic glue, of the building’s second-story façade. It’s all there: the window panes, a tangle of wires, the strings that pull the blinds up and down. The work is about 40 feet long and casts a glittering ice-like shadow on the wall behind it. Susan Robb directs our gaze to tiny dioramas in the building’s corners and cracks via two large, gloriously colored photographs in which in situ dust and grit share space with more organic forms of her own invention. Robb’s diptych suggests whole worlds that lie just beyond what we can–or are willing–to look at; the tiny buds of color might be ideas not yet bloomed.

In a similar vein, New York artist Shannon Kennedy takes us through the building’s guts. She threads endoscopic video equipment down pipes, through walls, and around rooms, showing us the fine bristles of insulation, pixelating dust, and crumbs of Styrofoam that look like nothing so much as colonies of fish eggs. This journey is shown on a five-minute loop that is absolutely mesmerizing and intimate, a universe of Star Trekkian strangeness, remote and inaccessible.

The building’s human element receives elegant attention as well. Jennifer McNeely has taken shards of drywall and turned them into tender pink flesh, packaged and tagged as if for cataloging. Patrick Holderfield’s giant blown-foam form nearly pulsates, bruised and wounded, like a sad tumor. The building is not, of course, flesh–healthy or otherwise–but both artists’ work attests to the fact that when a building is destroyed, the building doesn’t feel pain; we do.

And as with every great show, a partial written list of the works is not nearly as satisfying as seeing them in person. I’m not going to ruin the gentle jab of Brad Miller’s conceptual take on the sweat equity that artists bring to every space they work in, or the surprise of finding one of Robb’s intact dioramas still in place (there may be others). This is quite simply the best kind of show: very smart people making very smart work, to honor an institution that has encouraged very smart thinking from the beginning. It remains only for us to pay our last respects.