An artist’s work finds a lasting home
A new permanent exhibition in a house in Pittsburgh displays the creativity and artistry of Mark Dion
ARTIST Mark Dion stood in the hallway of a three-storey house in Troy Hill in Pittsburgh recently, ruminating on what was about to become a unique home for his wildly unusual array of creations.
From 1956 through 2018, the modest house in a working-class neighbourhood belonged to the Christopher family. But after the matriarch, Margaret Christopher, died in 2017, it was offered by her two sons to Evan Mirapaul, a philanthropic art collector and local resident.
Over the past two years, the house was gutted, rebuilt and meticulously transformed into a permanent installation to showcase Dion’s work, and it opens to the public on Saturday (Oct 26). It combines the Massachusetts native’s fascination with obsessive collecting, ordering and the preservation of things with questions over how natural history is understood in the Western world.
Christopher’s House is the fourth art house in the Troy Hill Art Houses series, a project led by Mirapaul, 65, whose inspiration, he said, came from a trip he took in 2007 when he visited repurposed homes on the island of Naoshima in Japan.
Dion is an unassuming man with salt-and-pepper hair who favours black-framed glasses. Dressed during a recent interview in a sky-blue button-down shirt, khakis and sneakers, he seemed to blend into the furniture, almost as if he was part of the house he created.
As a nod to his past work, everything here purposely refers to something Dion has created before, giving the house a “retrospective feel, so that each room is a predecessor to the next”, he noted.
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The experience begins on the first floor in the living room, which has been transformed into Christmas Eve circa 1961. A huge plate of glass separates the onlooker from the room, which meticulously depicts a blue-collar, upwardly mobile family while exploring the idea of the American dream.
Dion amassed thousands of objects to tell his artistic story, and that of the people who lived here. Vintage liquor bottles were tracked down. Handmade felt socks created in the 1950s and 1960s, which hang from the repurposed fireplace, took hours of detective work to find. Same for the “picture of the Kennedys, and a white Jesus purposely placed so you can only see his reflection in the mirror”, Dion added.
A skeletal, silver Christmas tree, surrounded by presents underneath, resides in one corner. Beautiful handmade wallpaper exuding a blue hue covers the walls; the doors and frames, piped in dark wood, match the furniture.
On the second floor, an enormous sleeping bear in a brick dungeon – reminiscent of a bear Dion exhibited at the Storm King Art Center in New York’s Hudson Valley in 2019 – commandeers the location once occupied by a remodelled 1970s bathroom.
The next room is a Lower East Side gallery in the 1990s, complete with a concrete floor, cheap lighting, a situation desk and 28 images of polar bears, which Dion photographed in various museums.
“The polar bear is a nod to a body of work I’ve been serious about and catalogues the change in our attitude from being a predatory and frightening animal to something fragile,” Dion explained. “A victim of climate change. Something that needs protection that’s sweet and cuddly.”
A darkened room, illuminated by objects painted with phosphorescent paint, leads to the Extinction Club room, featuring handmade periwinkle-coloured wallpaper peppered with an array of animals (rhinoceroses, pheasants, elephants); worn leather chairs; and curiosity cabinets filled with fossils, keys and mini liquor bottles.
“Downstairs is petrified. The Extinction Club welcomes your participation. You can sit in these chairs and embrace a fictionalised conversational space,” Dion said, pausing to adjust a bird in a brass cage. “I want to keep the viewer excited and curious, experiencing wonder at every turn.”
If the first and second floors highlight humans’ relationship to the natural world, the attic speaks to our collecting obsession, wonder and the power of stuff – Dion’s sweet spot.
More than 400 jars in a range of sizes – a microcosm from high culture to low culture, from the highly natural to highly artificial – are filled with a menagerie of items: seaweed, Monopoly hotels, chicken feet, a possum head and Paris subway cards. Most are personal: The broken eggshells, for example, are discards from his omelettes.
On the opposite wall reside just as many customised cigar boxes, many of which, he said he designed and produced and for which he printed the paper that lines them. “Visitors are encouraged to unscrew the jars and open the cigar boxes,” he added. “That’s the payoff.”
Dion spent two years locating these objects. Some were found at flea markets, church sales and antique malls; others came from Internet sleuthing. Some belonged to him and are “hard to part with – a raggedy doll I found in a flea market in Brazil, a celluloid object that I got in Paris,” he said, admitting that his own home resembles this room.
“We love home because it’s a reflection on us,” he noted. “This is a material catalogue of my life. If you cut me open, this is what you would see.”
The tour ends with an outside experience, the Confectionary Conservatory of Wonder, a glass cagelike case filled with, at first glance, gorgeous little desserts. “As you get closer you realise they’re covered with dead insects,” Dion said of the instalment he created with his wife, artist Dana Sherwood, with whom he often collaborates from their home in Copake, New York.
“Their beauty attracted the insects, ruining the desserts and killing the bugs,” he added. “We started making these pieces after we went to art fairs and we saw how people were drawn to vapid, beautiful, decorative things that weren’t very good for them.”
The desserts might not be; the house and this project, however, have been good for Dion, who said that he had felt “freer working here versus working with institutions, where many constraints coming from different departments exist”.
“This is authored,” he pointed out. “It’s an impactful, intimate, fertile and truthful space. You can keep returning to this. I want to have a serious catalogue that represents my body of work. I’m not interested in an online presence because I find that incredibly ephemeral.”
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