Homecloud was reviewed again here: http://chicago.timeout.com/articles/art-design/76157/home-page-at-arc-gallery-art-review
“HomePage”
by Lauren Weinberg
To Kayce Bayer, home is where the cotton-wool tornadoes are—or so it seems from the Chicago artist’s charming video Homecloud (pictured, 2009). Despite its focus on inclement weather, Bayer’s ten-minute animation casts a sunshiny glow over “Home Page,” a collaboration with her best friend, Kristin Miller Hopkins, an artist who lives in Florida.
Homecloud represents the weather systems of three places Bayer has lived: Chicago, Florida and Tennessee. The wordless piece is almost silent except for a few well-chosen sound effects, such as a creaking hamster wheel, ocean waves or human breath, used to evoke a brewing storm. The appeal of Homecloud comes from Bayer’s sophisticated manipulation of low-tech materials. Puffy cotton-ball clouds glide across gray skies and, in several surreal scenes, ricochet inside a tiny model house. Moving dioramas re-create snowfalls and the plink of raindrops. Hand-drawn pets and other simple illustrations enhance the animation’s playful, homespun feel, which Bayer extends into the gallery by displaying her drawings and sets, and allowing visitors to operate her dioramas themselves.
It’s a hard act for Hopkins to follow, and her recent meditations on domestic life—which take the form of neutral fabric and paper collages in Marriage Maps and a hand-bound book of photos and blueprint-like drawings in Homestellations—don’t offer quite the same level of gratification. Anti-Slides (2009), a series of violently scratched, poked and smudged found slides that visitors view with an obsolete projector, offers more potential. But we wish Hopkins had stitched both her dark materials and her beige ones into more coherent narratives.