It’s an AIDS memorial, a haven, a place to mourn. It’s whatever you need it to be when you enter the . . . Room With a View
Robert Gill--arms stretching toward heaven, legs launching his body off the ground--tumbles into a corner. He lands on his back, his body scrunched up like a human pretzel, face grin ning like a kid with his hands in a cookie jar.
Not to worry. The Sanctuary Project, a room made of 16 painted panels on which swirling, dancing, colliding colors melt into each other, is different things to different people.
Happy and mournful.
A laboratory for the soul. A nest. A womb.
A romper room for Gill.
That’s how artist Eric Karpeles, who created the space known as the Sanctuary, planned it. Intended as a haven and a ballast, a place of solace or in which to rejoice, the space opens today--World AIDS Day--with a memorial service at noon at AIDS Project Los Angeles.
The work makes its public debut at APLA in the former ABC Studios in Hollywood. Karpeles has dedicated the paintings--inspired by Mark Rothko, Monet and the 14th-Century Florentine painter Giotto--to communities affected by HIV/AIDS.
He is hoping the Sanctuary--erected in Studio 4 where shows such as “Queen for a Day,” “The Dating Game” and “The Gong Show” were filmed--will become a traveling exhibition so it can reach communities around the country, he says in an interview from his farmhouse in Tyler Hill, Pa.
Karpeles, who took 18 months to paint the project at his studio, says the room is meant for everyone to experience--whether it is to mourn someone who has died, to celebrate life or to just allow one’s feelings to flow openly, quietly, with a friend or alone.
After his romp in the Sanctuary, Gill, whose HIV was diagnosed five years ago, reflects on his life and that of loved ones--several of whom have died from complications of AIDS or are living with the disease. As he talks, he strolled through the room, sits, sprawls on the carpet and stands on a cushioned box to further take in the exhibit around him.
“This is about life, man. I see me in here. I see my life’s ups and downs,” Gill says as he walks past patches of bright yellows and golds and then skips across the room to a darker section of gray, black and browns. “I see the people I love. I see love and life and death because death is a sure thing too.”
New York-born Karpeles, 41, says his project is a hybrid, presented to the public as an installation and “my own commitment to the power of painting and the profound healing power of art.”
The project developed out of his own involvement as a painter and as someone who has been affected by the AIDS pandemic “in terms of the loss of friends. We’re living in a time of a plague and my work has always been elegiac in quality, always had a kind of pull toward sadness, wistfulness.”
He says the Sanctuary Project--paid for with his own funds--was his first “in which I predetermined what I wanted the emotional content to be.” He is raising funds through the nonprofit, Pennsylvania-based Art Exchange to pay for transportation of the exhibit to other cities after its L.A. appearance.
Because of the profound “issues of loss and mourning,” he says his work became capacious. So he came up with the idea of creating a room that could be used as a space for “spiritual activity because people in late 20th-Century American life are out of touch with their emotional, spiritual, inner selves.”
Staring into a white spot on one of the panels, Jeannie Mintz, an APLA staffer, finds the room soothing, an escape from the pressures of her job.
“It’s almost as if you could walk through that spot. For instance, if someone really enjoyed trees, he or she could go through there and in their mind, find a forest,” she says. After spending 20 minutes in the room, Mintz says the Sanctuary helped her “crystallize what is important to me.”
Glenn Gaylord, a community educator for APLA, is in awe of the multilayered Rothco-like images, “an appropriate metaphor for the AIDS epidemic,” he says, explaining that society has complicated “what could and should be a health emergency and compounded it with layers and layers of issues: finances, legal, housing.”
“There is no right or wrong way to look at this,” he says. “With an exhibit like this, the art isn’t so much about what is on the wall but what is inside the person looking at it.”
John Finck, who conducts AIDS prevention workshops for students across Los Angeles County, saw the Sanctuary two weeks ago when it was being installed and has returned. “I don’t find this particularly depressing or ebullient,” he says. “It’s a pretty quiet space to be reflective.”
The Rev. Joseph Gilbert, chairman of APLA’s spiritual advisory committee, hopes the nondenominational sanctuary will be seen as a prototype for a permanent structure.
“We need something that is meditative like this,” he says, looking up at a white taffeta tentlike roof draped above the room, from which timed floodlights cast varying intensities of light on the paintings.
“For anyone, life can get pretty frantic. Just knowing that there is a calm place in the world like this sanctuary is helpful.”
Talk like that pleases Karpeles.
“I think that we don’t have enough opportunities to take time to confront internal issues,” he says. “We all carry with us a sense of pain and suffering whether it has anything to do with AIDS or not. We all seek a kind of sanctuary. This is a place where people can come and experience a letting go and open up. A sanctuary gives you strength and strength is what the body needs, moral and physical.”