Assembled like bird’s nests and yet fully exposed and not fully anchored or integrated into the external beams of the centre on which they sit, Kawamata’s wooden cabin structures contrast greatly with their host glass and steel structure. Built of planks most of which seem to be non structural they evoke a gamut of sheltering possibilities from urban allotment shacks and shanty town homes to ersatz work site shelters and offices. They are eerily vacant and suggest a Matthew Barney Drawing Restraint Moment where art is being made in the most improbable places.

We aren’t allowed the pleasure of climbing up to and into them and thus relive the childhood experience of the tree house. Because they are unattainable these outposts become metaphor boxes akin to castles in the sky as seen in  japanese animes. Perhaps there is a scale game going on here whereby Kawamata is suggesting that we somehow wouldn’t fit into these assemblies. Perhaps they are the magnified images of tiny things.We are left, then, to dream of climbing up into one thus inhabiting an inner city outpost, deliciously suspended above and beyond the masses.

The incongruity of these plank clouds dotting the Pompidou doesn’t suggest symbiosis but rather benign parasitism. The groups of boards recall a swarm of bees,  a nomadic colony creating a “structure” by virtue of the way individuals converge to form a group. Weather, material deterioration, exhibition schedules and derogations will send this stuff on its way to regroup elsewhere.

This isn’t the first time that the Pompidou has housed a temporary structure. The Japanese architect Shigeru BAN used to have his cardboard offices on the roof. It was there that he designed his portion of the new Centre Pompidou Metz which is currently just a few days away from completion. Ban is well known for cardboard structures including the Nomad Museum and his paper emergency shelters for UNHCR. The paper shelters consisted of cardboard tubes covered in plastic. The tubes were cheap and easy to manufacture on site thus eliminating transportation costs.

Kawamata and Ban are cardboard soul mates but at opposite ends of the longevity spectrum. A sheet of this ubiquitous packaging material is almost fragile enough to do origami and yet when combined in layers and compressed can be used to build a museum. Kawamata takes his chances and opts for fragility while Ban must follow long term imperatives, including housing Kawamata creations.

Inside the museum Kawamata reverts to cardboard and  has set up a children’ workshop in a cardboard niche within the museum. A monumental gateway to this workshop that seems to have been eroded by the sands of time lends historic weight to the corrugated paper. Sound is muffled. We learn that cardboard is highly transformable and the workshop reveals many of its different states whether it be a solid wall or the support for a series of folds.  We slowly begin to see out of the cardboard box.

Elsewhere in the workshop space were learning stations consisting of metal closets complete the binders containing information sheets, a TV with a video and a fold out table. These are learning outposts for a country with neither computers nor internet.

The playfulness and delicateness of this mixture of corrugated paper works and woodworks is heartwarming even if a certain sad vacantness pervades. Cubic cardboard structures  lodged in the pipework like lost  balloons that escaped someone’s hands dot the Pompidou’s ceiling.Does the sadness come from ours and the artist’s knowledge that his work will disappear?  Kawamata’s structures as compared to the Pompidou present us with degrees of the temporary and the cobbled as compared to the engineered. How long will it be before Kawamata’s boxes become debris?

Humans depend on the temporary for short term solutions but we crave the solid and the enduring. As witnessed by today’s museum-building race we are constantly creating permanence to house impermanence. One social advantage with  temporary projects is that they give us time to either adopt or reject them. Perhaps the label “temporary” is a ploy to place new and potentially  antagonistic buildings within old quarters. Happy to know that it will all go the locals forget about it and then, before long, no one can live without it.

In any case Kawamata will never derange for long if he deranges at all. Here at the Pompidou he searches to establish outposts in far and unexploitable  places that are in sight and just out of arm’s length. He is interesting noise between information nodes, a gremlin dancing in and around the permanent collection pulling our gaze upwards and over, happily distracting us from the main feature.

Matt Savitsky's rendering of Panina Brown's original lullaby

The back story is that curator Marianne Bernstein matched up 17 artists with 10 families who had had their homes restored by volunteers of Rebuilding Together Philadelphia. The artists waded into the personal lives of the families, visiting, talking, sharing, and in some cases volunteering to make additional repairs.

Some of these match-ups worked brilliantly. The personal outpouring in some cases fuels something magical. But some of the exhibit is a straightforward record of people’s lives–personal and wonderful because people are wonderful. And some of the exhibit is just artists doing their thing, inspired by what they saw but strangely cool in the highly emotional environment of the show.

Matt Savitsky's interpretation of Joel Brown's bed design

Artist Matt Savitsky’s relationship with Joel and Panina Brown, an intense North Philadelphia couple, was a combustion chamber out of which came a collaboration between Savitsky and each of the Browns.  Joel, who has some engineering experience from the military, is an inventor of solutions to the world’s problems. He’s also an artist, although he doesn’t think of himself as one. And Panina loves–and buys to sell–inexpensive catalog products, the sorts of tschotschkes that no one needs. It is not clear how much she sells. But we know she buys and buys. Matt made a real-world version of a bed with closet and storage that Joel had designed for college dormitories. But in Matt’s version, the storage cubbies are stocked with Panina’s merchandise, priced so low that people were buying.

David Kessler's video shows Joel Brown holding Matt Savitsky's rendering of Brown's idea for a home with connected glass-domed pods to which family members can retreat from one another.

Savitsky also made a tin-foil “drawing” of the words to a song Panina made up to put her children to sleep. When I visited Shelter, Joel and Panina showed up, and she sang me the song, which sounded like a jump rope counting rhyme. Savitsky’s art shows the mind’s and hand’s ability to create something from nothing. Both of these deadpan pieces reflect the Browns with sympathy and understanding, at the same time giving the couple and their fantasies a voice and reach beyond what they themselves are able to achieve. Not on the wall of the show but included in David Kessler’s video of this couple is a watercolor drawing by Savitsky that visualizes another of Joel’s ideas–a home made up of glass-domed pods for each family member.

Joel Brown. He came with his wife the day I visited the exhibit and I got a chance to chat with him and his wife, Panina.

Kessler’s video is one of three spectacular videos that capture their subjects. Kessler’s rises above documentary with his sharp eye for telling details. He shows the Browns’ passions as expressed through physical objects and their words. The video, which doesn’t show the couple’s faces, does show how their minds and personalities create the lives they lead and the values they have.

Judy Gelles captures the thoughts and contradictions of JB, who has found a happier life now that she is free of men.

Ricardo Rivera’s video is of the bedside vigil of Albert Harrison as his partner Gloria Brown recounts non-stop her memories as she lays dying. The video is projected a hospital bed and the wall above to put the viewer in the room with them. While the projection doesn’t quite do that, it does pack a punch, with the urgent talking of Gloria and the facial expressions of Harrison as touchstones of life and love and the importance of shared memories. A Zoe Strauss photo of Albert shortly after Brown’s funeral also packs a punch, especially if you know that is what you are looking out. Without that bit of information, I was a bit confused about its edgy oddness.

Katie Tachman's wallpaper installation merges portraits of her own family, Zettie Brown's, and those of complete strangers from found photos.

Also notable in video is Danielle Lessovitz’s portrait of Juanita Wooten, who delivers her philosophy of life as she gardens her collection of cactus. Wooten  wonders about survival and the feistiness of nature, both issues reflected in her own character. Mostly wheelchair bound although she gets around a bit on crutches, Wooten has an indomitable spirit. She had trained as a textile designer, and her love of visual beauty is reflected in her appearance. This video was inspirational. But nearly all the video had inspirational moments.

Marc Bernstein tells the story of love in Robert Small's house.

Other works that accomplish the mix of understanding and sharing come from Judy Gelles, Katie Tachman and Marc Bernstein.  Gelles’ portrait of JB’s house and words recounts the West Philadelphia woman’s take on life, which she prefers without men. The wry but sympathetic capture of so much with such economic means is remarkable. Tachman’s photo-based wallpaper, which includes portraits of Zettie Brown’s mother and Tachman’s grandmother, captures a sense of home and the connections between people, love and keepsakes. Marc Bernstein’s vision of Robert Small’s loving family home is strangely wonderful, with its windowed curtain facade and its cat birthday party.

Phillip Adams walk-through installation of a ticker tape parade with onlookers and storm clouds. It made me think of 9/11.

Some of the other works in this show succeed in other ways. Phillip Adams’ piece, a spectacular ticker tape parade, communicates an ironic anger and sadness, and Daniel Heyman’s prints get at the value and dignity of an individual. Both of these artists were connected to a group of veterans, and the works spotlight the indifference of the military to the men whose lives it chews up.  These pieces, without their sense of family, seem like they belong to a different show.

I didn’t see Damon Reaves’ performance, only a related box of dirt, but it is scheduled to be repeated on First Friday, Dec. 4. Others in the show are Adam Corrigan, Joan Wadleigh Curran, John Broderick Heron, Dierdra Krieger, Nicholas Santore, and Eva Wylie.

When I saw it, this exhibit needed a road map.  The exhibit essay by Bernstein was intended to do that job, but that meant picking it up and reading it then and there. I do know Bernstein added some more directional signals after I was there. I hope that did the trick, because the show had so much to like.

Big news this First Friday: A new gallery, Marginal Utility , is opening in the Vox building. The six-story former factory building already houses Vox Populi , Copy , AHN/VHS , Progressive Sharing , Jeffrey Stockbridge Fine Art and Tiger Strikes Asteroid . With the addition of Marginal Utility on the second floor, the alternative art scene truly has a new center of gravity.

Ronnie Bass, still from The Astronomer, at Marginal Utility opening Nov. 6

Founded by Basekamp ’s David Dempewolf and Yuka Yokoyama —who also launched the recent art theory zine Machete—Marginal Utility has 700 square feet of space including a 500-square-foot gallery and a separate work space for artists in residence.

First up in the new space is “The Astronomer, Part 1: Departure From Shed , ” a nine-minute video projection and sculpture project by New York artist Ronnie Bass . The video—still in production—is a yarn about oppression and a better future acted out by a small cast which includes the artist. The piece is rooted in 19th-century French philosopher Charles Fourier’s writings on utopian societies.

Ronnie Bass, The Astronomer

Still images show the actors highlighted against a black background giving a sense of disembodiment and foreboding. Bass’ sculpture project, which will grow and change during the show’s two-month run, is a water fountain made with garage sale and dollar store 
purchases—highly un-utopian.

P. Timothy Gierschick, Golem, from his show at Tiger Strikes Asteroid

P. Timothy Gierschick ’s abstract paintings at Tiger Strikes Asteroid whisper like Morse Code tapping a quiet but insistent message. The works in ”Patch and Plot” subvert universal signs and symbols like rainbows and geometrical shapes twisting them into new designs that suggest something familiar without being clear. Is the rainbow edge around a cloverleaf pattern happy? Geirschick — a member of Tiger Strikes Asteroid collective — uses spray paint, house paint, enamel and collage on found furniture, scrap wood and cardboard.

Daniel Heyman, from the Shelter show at the Painted Bride

From the impresario of ”Welcome House , ” the recent temporary public art project in Love Park, comes ”Shelter , ” at the Painted Bride Art Center . Marianne Bernstein , an artist and activist, organized the group show to foster a dialog between artists and the public about social issues. Before the show, 14 artists were paired with 10 Philadelphia families to make art dealing with issues of family crisis and homelessness. The photography, painting, video and drawings that resulted are art as social activism by artists known for great empathy in their art. Printmaker Daniel Heyman created word-and-image portraits of veterans in transitional housing. Ricardo Rivera of the Klip Collective made a documentary video of a dying and bedridden woman, Gloria, and her devoted husband.

Bernstein, a filmmaker and photographer, also has great empathy for people.  Her new photo book, “Tatted,” shows tattooed strangers she photographed in the alleyways behind the South Street tattoo shops.  The works capture the personalities of the tattooed men and women with great care and love. Tatted, published by Grit City Inc, launches Dec. 4 at Pure Gold Gallery.

Jeffro Kilpatrick's The Nearness of You, in the Creature show at Brave New Worlds

Need more Halloween imagery? Check out ”Creature Double Feature” at Brave New Worlds . The show features original works by 20 artists who are affiliated with the Philadelphia Cartoonist Society. Concetta Barbera and Christian Patchell curated the show which will have small scale prints, drawings and books at reasonable 
prices

Ronnie Bass: “ The Astronomer, Part 1: Departure From Shed ,” Through Jan. 10. Reception: Fri., Nov. 6, 6-9pm. Marginal Utility, 319 N. 11th St., second fl. 917.355.4487.

Philadelphia Cartoonist Society: “ Creature Double Feature ,” Through Nov. 25. Reception: Fri., Nov. 6, 6-9pm. Brave New Worlds, 45 N. Second St. 215.925.6525.