On a quiet street in Greenwood, a modest bungalow awaits a common fate in housing-hungry Seattle. It will be demolished to make room for a multiunit condo building. But before it disappears, it will be transformed into a home for art.
This uncommon project, called “ONCE REMOVED,” is the brainchild of Zoë Hensley and Sammy Skidmore, who have partnered with a local developer to turn soon-to-be-razed buildings into opportunities for artists to create new, site-specific work. The Greenwood house — which opens with a party Saturday — is the first in what Hensley and Skidmore hope is a series of exhibitions that, according to Skidmore, will give these places “one last breath.”
As gallery managers of two prestigious galleries — with Hensley at Foster/White and Skidmore at Traver Gallery — and active members of Seattle’s art scene, Hensley and Skidmore identified a lack of options for some artists to show experimental work. So when the chance to temporarily use a house came along through a family friend, they constructed the idea and invited five artists to create new art that engages with themes of impermanence, memory, domesticity or displacement.
Walking through the front door and into the living room, visitors will be met with ghostly figures draped in black, a sculptural installation by Jenikka Cruz, a student at Seattle University (where, full disclosure, I work). This unsettling encounter was inspired by the artist’s contemplation of the phrase “forever home,” which, she said, “promises eternal security, but we don’t always have control over what happens in life.”
“I see a house as having a soul,” Cruz added. “And the house as a vessel for many souls. There’s a lot of memory within this house. I hope the audience can reflect on their own experiences and memories of safety in their own homes.”
Nadia Ahmed has filled a bedroom with “Shrines,” composed of items left behind in the house, then preserved in beeswax and displayed like relics. “This was someone’s home,” Ahmed said. “That’s such a special, intimate place to be. I want to be really considerate and respectful of that as I explore how we place value on these things. What counts as sacred? Is a home sacred?”
Ahmed is also creating a video and performance piece about her personal and cultural experiences with home and loss of home as a first-generation Pakistani American. “I’m thinking about how all this movement, this displacement, this immigration trickles down into me,“ she said. “What happens when a space is gone and you’re forced to move on?”
In the other bedroom, Rachael Comer has installed her own bed, imprinted with the shape of her body and stiffened by starch. Visitors can literally peek under the covers to view a video of Google searches based on people’s changing habits with pornography. “It is in no way a condemnation of pornography,” Comer stated, “but it is a strong statement against misogyny. I’ve been talking with people from my generation, who grew up with access to pornography during a time when it became incredibly more violent and aggressive.”
Comer is also thinking about how a very private experience is shared in a “world filled with technology that’s affecting us far more than we’re able to deal with. It has such profound impacts in society, in community, in intimate relationships.”
Rounding out this new family of artists is Gaeun Kim, who will contribute ceramic doorknobs and other meditations on architectural elements, and Ali Meyer, who will project a video into a hole in a wall.
Hensley and Skidmore are interested in how all of these artists are creating new work that will communicate with each other in a particular place within a short period of time. (There is no closing date set for the exhibition because they will pack up as soon as demolition is scheduled, likely before the end of this month.)
Hensley, who is also a woodworking artist, underscored the importance of the physical site, saying: “We experience so many things online, I want to create spaces that are really accessible, that draw people in, where you truly have to be there to experience it all.”
Noting the one-of-a kind nature of the project, Skidmore, who is a musician, said: “Like a musical performance, it’s a moment in time that can’t be duplicated or replicated or captured in the same way.”
“ONCE REMOVED” is a marker of the here and now, but it also joins a lineage of house-based art installations going back at least as far as 1972’s “Womanhouse” in Los Angeles, where now-famed artists Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro collaborated with students and other artists to convert an abandoned house into a monthlong site for installations and performances.
Closer to home, in 2011, the arts organization MadArt took over five Capitol Hill houses, which were given the artistic treatment — inside and out — by artists including Amanda Manitach, Allyce Wood and the trio SuttonBeresCuller.
Hensley thinks about “ONCE REMOVED” as “adding a very small epilogue to the story of this house, like the feeling when you’ve read a book and you’ve fallen in love with the characters in this very private, intimate space. And then you close the book. It feels like it’s simultaneously yours and like it’s gone.”
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