WITHDRAWING

ROOM

The century-old wood-frame house at 65 Capp Street in San Francisco, entombed within sculptor David Ireland’s renovation, is the site for an artist-in-residence program. The house serves as both dwelling and studio for visiting artists and, simultaneously, is the site for multidisciplinary installations that are open to the public. The house’s double program of residency and gallery acts reflexively on the theme of withDrawing Room: a probe into the conventions of private rite, a rumination on contemporary domesticity. Visitors are invited to move freely through the installation and are allowed visual access, however restricted, to the living quarters of visiting artists. Boundaries between public and private space are blurred by penetrations of private acts into the public domain and vice versa. The installation defines a domestic field in the interval between the skin of the house and the skin of the resident. Within that territory, a series of architectural episodes focuses on the property line, etiquette, and hygiene: systems of legal, social, and somatic codes that are progressively private in nature.

Two intersecting walls partition the house’s double-height interior into four distinct quadrants. The datum of the original attic floor virtually subdivides the quartered volume horizontally, suggesting a phantom second level. Domestic tableaux are positioned along a series of vantage points. Some are seen in normal perspective, and some are viewed objectively, borrowing from architectural systems of notation that flatten three-dimensional space into plan, section, and elevation. Rotations of vantage point around the domestic scenes produce an oscillation between experiential and analytical information. Given the cultural subject matter of “home” and the visitor’s freedom of movement throughout the space, the role of the viewer continually fluctuates between that of voyeur and that of detached observer.

The installation includes only ready-mades—the house itself and generic furniture—in order to de-emphasize design. To that end, all elements are “de-signed”: stripped of their fixed cultural meanings. Some elements, without limbs or otherwise impaired, are given prosthetic assistance.