1157 South Taylor Ave.
Margaret Leininger, host
Shannon Stratton, curator
Lisa Boumstein-Smalley & Geoff Smalley
& Kevin Carney, artists
Conspicuous Invisibility
Our homes’ exteriors are of an era, be it post-Chicago Fire construction or pre-recession McMansion. We play it safe by not calling attention to our personal oases by limiting our paint to muted colors, maintaining lawns, and rotating porch décor to keep current with the holidays. We sit on our private porch as the public wanders by, but the air is free and as they pass these semi-strangers steal glances or pass their curious gazes into our homes for a peek beyond the thresholdWe watch others while others watch us; it’s an agreement we have simply by living a non-reclusive life…we are hiding in plain sight.
Walking in our neighborhood of Jefferson Park along Milwaukee Avenue near Lawrence, we took note of a secret-special-relic-of-a-3–story-stone-house complete with turret and a perfectly patinated copper roof. Sandwiched between a food & liquor store and Criss’s hair design, the crumbling beauty is decidedly camouflaged by misshapen pine trees and a wall of evergreen bushes, perhaps to keep strangers from looking in, perhaps to keep the inevitable and banal evolution of urbanity out. The homeowner’s desire to go unnoticed only piques curiosity more, but respect and fear of what is beyond the foliage keeps us squarely in the public domain of the sidewalk.
Whether we are working to keep people out or trying to peek in, we don’t necessarily locate our selves within these experiences. The installation/sculpture that GeoffrySmalley, Kevin Carney and I (Lisa Boumstein-Smalley) creating for this year’s Terrain Biennial is borrowing from traditional camouflage techniques and materials combined with mirrored Mylar film to address the tension of what it means to conceal our personal spaces while we too try to peek in at others.
Shannon Stratton is the Mildred and William Lasdon Chief Curator at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York. Prior to assuming this role, she co-founded and was Executive Director of Threewalls, a Chicago based not-for-profit for the presentation of contemporary art and ideas. Established in 2003, Threewalls has grown from a start-up exhibition space to a vital visual arts organization supporting contemporary art through solo exhibitions, residencies, grants, publications, conferences and commissioning programs. With Green Lantern Press she founded and published (via Threewalls) PHONEBOOK, a guide to contemporary independant and artist-run projects, now in its 4th volume and under development as a smart-phone app. She is a co-founder of The Common Field, a national alliance of and advocacy group for small-scale visual arts platforms and their producers.
Artist Sketches:
