THE HAUS OF LUNA

by Dr. Sally Tomlinson

Anyone can walk through Sol’s large installation, The Haus Of Luna, that fills every room of a forties house in Vancouver and simply enjoy the color, variety, and playfulness of the myriad displays. But then, in a quiet moment some days later the images erupt in the mind, like the whispers of dream images that don’t quite leave us alone in the daytime. And when that happens, the experience of Sol’s Haus melts into one’s thoughts, like the Dali-styled clock on the mantel—a direct quote that is reassuringly familiar among the disparate Buddhas and Classical busts displayed astride the precision geometry in black-and-white paint that diagonally bisects a fireplace. Was the experience of walking through each room merely fun, or was Sol asking more of us? Why is the other half blue?

The twentieth-century Surrealist group were not merely playful, although that was integral to their MO. They offered visual hints—Freudian, Jungian, snippets from our collective unconscious—to tease a process of self-exploration. We see in the Haus drips streaming down a refrigerator, green heads hanging upside down, like bats, from a ceiling, and we wonder, what does it all mean? And is the meaning Sol’s, or is it ours? What connections are made from our experience—our dreams, traumas, triumphs—and as we think we are plumbing Sol’s consciousness, we consider, in the days that follow and we have just memories of the rooms—which room affected us most? Why that one?

There is a golden cave, as textured as hewn stone, and caverns are always magical thoughtful places. In the background is another layer--of sound, as the reverberations that Sols’ alchemist husband, Jim, produced, layered into each room. From the golden cavity, we approach the most playful room—the dayglo kitchen, with its lights igniting the neon vinyl. If we were conscious in the eighties, we recognize the disco-like dazzle of color and pattern—memory also comes into play. 

Sol remarks that she likes the transitions between rooms, where one sits amidst the textures of one area and sees a corner of what comes next—in this case, a hallway of dizzying Op Art patterns, black and white stripes that seem to move in patterns that collide. Relief is found in an all-white room, spare as a Minimalist monochrome. In this almost clinical whiteness, inconspicuously small in a corner are two Covid-19 globes, their red pompoms the only full-on hue in that space. Covid and emptiness, commentary on the lone artist who labored for months, isolated in her Haus, just as we all were?

Mona Lisa Wows, mylar reflects with colored multiplications of our form, an infinity of selves, and music invites us to dance and watch our rainbow shadows play across the room. Yayoi Kusama has nothing on the Haus bathroom. Funny how polka dots can render a room dysfunctional.

Is there meaning in any or all of this? And what meaning/s do I assign to it all?

The Haus Of Luna is fully contemporary in that it doesn’t sit across from us like a museum sculpture on a plinth, but invites us in, asks us to engage, to play, to ponder, without giving us readymade answers. And in the days that follow, does our rumination tell us more about the Haus or ourselves?

Dr. Sally Tomlinson is an art historian who spent most of her life in California, where she earned a bachelor of arts degree from the University of California, Berkeley. She moved to Canada to study with a Van Gogh scholar but changed course to write a master’s thesis on the San Francisco rock posters for the University of Victoria. 

After working as a journalist in Northern California for a few years, she completed her doctoral studies in medieval Irish art history, earning her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 2007.   In fall 2007, she joined Clark College, where she is a full-time professor of art.

Dr. Tomlinson, who resides in Vancouver, has written essays on the rock posters for the San Diego Museum of Art, Penguin Books’ Portable Sixties Reader (ed. Anne Charters, 2003) and the Tate-Liverpool’s “Summer of Love” exhibition of 2007, in addition to her master of arts thesis which was completed in the early 1990s.  In September 2009, she was invited to speak about the posters for an exhibition opening at the Flint Art Institute in Michigan.

Dr. Tomlinson teaches courses in Western and non-Western art history at Clark College.