At Fleisher Art Memorial three artists (one of which is technically a collaboration between two individuals) have taken over the gallery space with a wide range of media and messages for the 2014 Wind Challenge 2. In this Knight Arts grantee‘s current show, Janell Olah, Talia Greene and BARBARISM (Sarah Secunda and Rebecca Katherine Hirsch) tackle such topics at urban decay, family life, interior/exterior spaces, sexuality and gender roles through installations, prints, videos and walls covered in taped-up collages of photos and text.

Janell Olah, “Go to where you can breathe.”

Most notable at the gallery’s threshold are the synthetic billows of Janell Olah’s “Go to where you can breathe.” Bristling with sheets of fake green grass most often seen as indoor/outdoor flooring on porches beside lawn gnomes and plastic flamingos, the installation has a kitschy feel that waxes nostalgic and basks in its tackiness. Cylindrical lights in pinks, greens and blues glow through a frosty, translucent backing, providing pastel lighting to a stage area that can either be communal or divided into personal seating areas. Up front, a puffy, inflatable ‘sun’ emerges from a semi-circular box to greet those seated with an orange sunset, which serves to ease the troubled mind.

By all accounts, the whole area is quite playful and innocent. The inviting colors and gentle hum of the air filling the plush sun submerge visitors in pleasant hues and white noise so they may find themselves in a quaint sort of paradise that resides halfway between a backyard and a department store display.

Talia Greene, “Ruination (Rana Plaza).”

Talia Greene takes a dystopian slant to Olah’s outdoor oeuvre in a series of framed prints and a thorny, creeping design across the white walls. The prints depict scenes of architectural ruin and collapse that could easily be the result of disuse and neglect, as much as the location of an earthquake or hurricane. With the lines between human and natural disaster blurred, we are left only with these colorless scenes of deterioration on appropriately aged and discolored, yellowed paper.

Talia Greene, “Whistling Thorn (detail).”

While the prints capture elements of the Romantic and archaic, a spread of printed branches grasps out and around the rectangular frames in a demonstration of the powerful and dispassionate forces of nature and their inevitable incursion on our human world. Between the thorns, tiny ants march on and around the wooden intruders, more mobile but equally as aloof as extensions of this unseen vine as it encroaches on the artwork.

Dual video projections by BARBARISM.

Obnoxious and unrelenting, BARBARISM explores the nature of contemporary sex and gender roles through in-your-face images and sounds most directly through videos that flash not-quite-advertisements and catcalls toward the unwitting viewer. From the vulgar to the genuinely ridiculous, the duo behind BARBARISM clearly has a lot to say about the parts we’re so often assigned due to, well… our parts. By harassing an unseen audience to see their ears in a way that is as sexual as it is irrational, we wind up on the receiving end of a parody that proves just how demeaning and thoughtless such advances are (if anyone was truly unaware).

BARBARISM, among other things, goads visitors to bedeck themselves with makeup.

The rest of the BARBARISM show seems as urgent as it is organic. It is as if the notes, textbooks and journals of a Women’s Studies major suddenly exploded across the space. They question why such ‘strange girls’ as themselves were born, meanwhile asking visitors to ‘bedeck’ themselves with provided makeup. Taking a noisy and humorous approach to very real and unfunny topics, the duo posture themselves in a way that makes them practically impervious to criticism, and despite their somewhat grave subject matter, they seem to have a great time concocting these convoluted scenarios and social commentaries.

All three sections of the 2014 Wind Challenge 2 will be on display at Fleisher through January 31 along with a series of workshops and symposiums scheduled between January 21 and 28.

Fleisher Art Memorial is located at 719 Catherine St., Philadelphia; [email protected]; fleisher.org.