Desiree Beauchamp: "What is a Home?" - Duke Realty Corporation Atrium - June 16, 2004 - 1/1/2 stars

1 N. Capitol office. Kudos to Duke Realty Corporation for providing a student sculpture competition that awarded Desiree Beauchamp, Herron School or Art student, a $3,000 scholarship and a year-long exhibition opportunity for her winning entry, "What Is a Home." The piece, composed of multitudes of little felt houses suspended from the ceiling, is inferior in design, execution, and purpose. The last point is especially true when compared to comparably themed successful installations by Jenny Elkins at the Harrison Center for the Arts of card houses set in sand as a statement on the fragility of home and home life, or "Suberburbia" by Emily Kennerk at the Stutz Gallery. Ceramicist Barbara Zech presented a series of same-sized and shaped homes in an installation last year which also lined a wall in the Harrison Center for the Arts Gallery. Design-wise, the houses feature intentionally childlike constructed box home forms of synthetic felts with two flat square windows and a door flat on front. It's iconic signage for home. Only, this 3-D derivation is ineffectively childlike with its perfect 90-degree angles and unappealing, hard to look at color combinations - white with brown, blue with maroon. With some felt houses collapsing in, not maintaining their form and sloppy machine stitch work perfectly visible, this "playful" and "happy" vision of home further fizzled. -Mary Lee Pappas