Donna Dennis’s evocative—and marvelous—exhibition, Houses and Hotels, features five sculptures resembling old cabins, a rustic B + B, and a hotel façade, all scaled down, architectural relics from a bygone era. Installed in the darkened galleries of O’Flaherty’s in the East Village, itself an endangered architectural environment, the exhibition has a haunted atmosphere. We make our way through the galleries as if strolling along the sidewalk of an old, deserted town on the evening of a New Moon. Rather than architectural models or doll houses, the sculptures, dating from 1972 (Hotel Pacifico)—near the beginning of Dennis’s long career—to 1994 (Cataract Cabin), are made to human scale, that is, approximately six feet tall, or nearly eleven feet high in the case of Two Stories with Porch (for Robert Cobuzio) (1977-1979).
—David Ebony