The House is Alive!

Olivia Erlanger is steering an intergalactic voyage that zig-zags between the worlds we build and the worlds we dream up. The New York-based artist cannibalizes man-made structures to curious and insightful ends across writing, films, multi-sensory installations, and sculptures. When viewed as a whole, a layered and visceral study of everyday preoccupations, technological advancement, the climate crisis, and existential woes comes into focus. After all, it takes a powerful imagination to fathom what tremendous impact human consumption will have on the environment in the not-so-distant future.

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In her solo museum exhibition “If Today Were Tomorrow,” which opens April 20, 2024 at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Erlanger zeroes in on man-made domestic structures—electrical grids and appliances—then zooms out to outer space. The museum is transformed into an immersive world. Pastel sculptures of minimal, developed planets, such as Prime meridian, 2024, feature a map of the I-95 highway and boxy modernist homes with small, LED-lit windows. Dioramas contain otherworldly desert terrains and a radiation-green extraterrestrial city on a ocean floor. Arrows pierce the staircase. 

Elsewhere, a home interior set mirrors her new short film Appliance, 2024, originally adapted from a play ​​Humour in the Water Coolant, which appeared alongside an installation and publication also entitled Appliance in 2023. Her take on a haunted-house tale stars Callie Hernandez as Sophie, a young woman who is haunted by her new house’s appliances, and Sasha Frolova as Crystal, a psychic investigator employed to address the house’s eerie frequency. Each neglected appliance becomes sculptural under Erlanger’s lens, imbued with conceptual weight.

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The artist is concerned with the inverse of the American dream that seeps into our waking life: the problems of today and their implications for tomorrow. At Frieze London in 2017, she debuted Body Electric, an installation where motion sensor benches triggered sci-fi climate-catastrophe narratives, and a sheen of blue light and fog ebbed and flowed throughout the room fluctuating with the price of oil. The artist has built a giant tentacle sculpture, mermaid tails in an LA Laundromat, and floral-wallpaper-clad eye sockets containing a 3-D miniature sets. 

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Now, in Appliance half-opened boxes flank the rooms in normal just-moved-in fashion, moldy produce rots in the refrigerator, dirty dishes pile on the counter, murky water spouts from a faucet, and static sockets threaten but never combust. Unnerving music builds and things only get weirder. Something ominous is stirring within the house. Sophie spends the film trying to figure out what it is. 

“I know you think you came here to build something of your own, but I hear desperation as if you’re dying to connect," Crystal, the psychic, later tells Sophie as she lays out a series of trinkets on a table to perform a séance, a small child in tow. Maybe Sophie is dying, unwell, or surviving through the help of the fluid she injects into her stomach with needles every day (is it insulin?). But connect to what exactly? Possibly herself. In the end, there is no resolution. Unexplained phenomena remains exactly that. And Sophie sweeps up shards of glass cup, inexplicably shattered from the night before. The house persists. 

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Raised in a suburban Connecticut town, Erlanger developed an interest in the charged and symbolic nature of the home. She was 9 years old when Disney’s cult-classic Smart House came out in 1999. The trope of a house as an entity that is alive or haunted has long been a staple in sci-fi as well as horror films like The Haunting, 1963 and The Shining, 1980. Yet, in the last few decades, a home with a mind of its own has become something more tangible. A quick Google search for such living houses brings up a website for luxury smart home solutions and numerous articles on what has recently been coined the “dumb house,” meaning a home without technology-heavy amenities. If the movement towards sentient homes and technology that encroaches on autonomy is any indication, the theatrics and magic realism of Erlanger’s scenes soon might prove to be more fact than fiction.

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“Olivia Erlanger: If Today Were Tomorrow,” is on view April 20 through October 27, 2024 at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston at 5216 Montrose Blvd, Houston, TX 77006.