Reimaging a Home

Steep and narrow rialto street, once known as pig Hill and the route from the Allegheny River to the slaughterhouse, is a piece of Pittsburgh history.

At the top of the hill is a new addition to local experience, the art houses of Troy Hill. As contemporary interpretations of historic house museums — Henry Clay Frick’s Clayton and Fallingwater are superb local examples — their redevelopment is an act of preservation but, more importantly, a reconceptualization of ordinary neighborhood homes. Artists have been given the opportunity to reflect upon evolving definitions of home within both historical and contemporary contexts as they imagine new environments. Unique, idiosyncratic, puzzling, and charming, these works of art appeal to visitors of all ages.

This “village within a neighborhood” is the brainchild of Evan Mirapaul, art collector, founder of the PGH Photo Fair, and a violinist who performed with the Pittsburgh Symphony for almost a decade. He now lives on Troy Hill where, about 10 years ago, he started developing the art houses, which were inspired by an extraordinary project on Naoshima. He visited the small island in the Seto Inland Sea of Japan in 2006 to explore a series of abandoned structures that were offered to accomplished artists as sites for art. The international artists repurposed seven buildings as homes, shrines, spas, and art galleries in the years on either side of the millennium. An art colony has grown around them with, at present, 11 museums and art spaces. It is now an art destination.

Naoshima and Troy Hill have become permanent iterations of a trend popular since the 1980s when artists moved out of art museums, using houses or commercial buildings instead. Intertwined with the growth of site-specific work and an interest in history, much of the work addressed definitions and meanings of home. The place where we live, whether a house, room, cave, institution, or piece of cardboard on the sidewalk, has fascinated artists for centuries; they have explored associated feelings of comfort, family, security, domesticity, and belonging, to name a few. Three Rivers Arts Festival featured site-specific works in a 1996 show called Points of Entry.

On Troy Hill, traces of local and personal history, as well as flights of fancy and probing investigations, have led to immersive settings intended to unlock memories and imaginations. What is interesting at the Troy Hill structures is the multiplicity of ideas and sensations that percolate in the space, offered without the usual definitive explication to encourage open-ended responses. It is possible to see the works as three-dimensional archives that reference creation, preservation, and presentation, as well as individual and collective histories and beliefs.

The first house, opened in 2013, was staged by Thorsten Brinkmann, a German artist whom Mirapaul knew personally. La Hütte Royal is filled with secrets and surprises galore that upset expectations of navigating space. Like a house of mirrors or an amusement park funhouse, no description does it justice. Fourteen rooms on four floors await discovery, a topsy-turvy world of surrealist enigma paired with local roots. There is always some new observation or revelation.

Then, 2019 brought Kunzhaus by Polish artist Robert Kusmirowski, whose work Mirapaul discovered at a Berlin Biennial. Encountering unexpected scenes such as an abandoned dark room or an early computer room leaves viewers scratching their brains. Kusmirowski was fascinated with futuristic, space-age visions from the 1960s as he created a haunted house-like experience, complete with tombstones in the front yard.

The third intervention required a leap of faith as Pittsburgh couple Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis set out to place a lighthouse, complete with a working light, inside their small rowhouse. Darkhouse Lighthouse (2022) alludes to the transformation of a fire-gutted home into a place or residence of sanctuary, security, and hope, with the lighthouse serving as its support structure. Their work is simultaneously the simplest with the basic necessities of daily life and maritime instruments and tools as well as most complex in terms of construction.

Mark Dion was an obvious choice to follow in their footsteps because his resume is filled with similar projects. For the 1999 Carnegie International, for example, he constructed and outfitted a rustic “scientific research station” in the museum’s decorative arts galleries. He is a multi-hyphenate artist with serious interests in natural science and history, museum ideology and presentation, and the history of ideas. He has orchestrated various “expeditions” leading to art and science exhibitions involving archeological activities and finds from the Museum of Modern Art’s sculpture courtyard, digs in the Thames River outside both Tate Britain and Tate Modern, and the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. He even sifted through garbage and treasures uncovered at three undistinguished sites in New England. As an artist who is a self-taught, pseudo-scientist/archeologist/art historian, he interrogates various disciplines and discoveries, examining how we accumulate and classify finds and artifacts and how we then construct historical accounts based on them. The unintentional mixing of facts and fictions in our interpretations throughout history fascinates him, and he encourages us to ask probing questions about knowledge and understanding.

In a truly astounding effort, Dion orchestrated the rescue of a fallen Western Hemlock so it could be a site of regeneration in Seattle’s Olympic Park in 2006. Housed in a functioning greenhouse, the tree has become the source of a new biosystem, giving life through death as an example of the regeneration of nature. Working across disciplines, he is obsessed with not only knowledge but also how we gather it and subsequently use, misuse, or abuse it. In his installations, he presents us with sensory and mind-expanding overload as he takes nothing for granted.

The depth and breadth of his activities can be seen in the mind-blowing, excessive references in Mrs. Christopher’s House (2024). He recycles elements from previous projects, carefully sources vintage and new materials, and culls his own eclectic collections in a mini retrospective that covers a lot of territory. Four rooms, each with their own purpose and/or theme, are carefully curated with an overabundance of objects and clues for the visitor to explore and ponder. Dion gives us an atmosphere of wonder, recalling childhood experiences where a sense of awe outweighs specific understanding as we keep asking, “Why?” He combines serious research and never-ending curiosity, hoping to foster new ways of looking and thinking. He starts with a large clue just inside the house, a closed door with an official identifying sign: Bureau of the Center for the Study of Surrealism and Its Legacy. Here is the “official” study center for serious research about an early 20th-century artistic practice known for provocative and unusual juxtapositions. It liberates our thoughts and minds. In Pittsburgh, Dion presents oddities and marvels within the mundane and ordinary.

The living room, with a nod to the house’s previous owners, is a recreation of the year 1961. Decorated to within an inch of its life, it’s pure heaven for fans of trivia. There is the ubiquitous aluminum tree with its revolving color light, ribbon candy and Brazil nuts in glass dishes, presents wrapped in vintage paper, Christmas cards arranged on the mantel, homemade cut paper snowflakes. No detail was too small for Dion as he staged the scene: starburst wallpaper, a basket of yarn with knitting needles, a viewfinder with extra disks, and even cigarette butts.

This domestic holiday tableau is encapsulated behind a glass window, mimicking audience-favorite dioramas or tableaus in natural history or house museums. These supposedly “true-to-life” displays help us imagine past events. Based on memories and research, they can confuse fact with fiction while also fusing the real, the remembered, and the imaginary. As viewers seeking accuracy, we rarely question the validity of these scenes when we should be paying closer attention. A great example is the mountain lion diorama, which had to be updated because its depiction was influenced by human rather than animal nature. Earlier representations showed the males as the hunters, yet studies have shown that it is the females who are responsible for providing provisions for the family.

Another room filled with meaningful objects is one we can actually enter. Called the Extinction Club, it is styled as a gentlemen’s hunting club, a private gathering place where the male of the species decompresses after the hunt or seeks convivial conversation with like-minded compatriots. The details here are endless: ironic wallpaper featuring endangered species, butterfly and fishing nets, shelves stuffed with books and a variety of skulls in cabinets, microscopes, and even The Invisible Man model. We can fit these objects into an overall narrative, but there are also out-of-the-ordinary moments. There is a dead bird in its cage near the window, a detail that looks wrong. Why hasn’t it been removed or why didn’t it escape, since the cage door is open? Examples like this are where Dion leaves the interpretation up to the viewer, refusing to tie up all loose ends.

The continuing dialogue between true/false and assumption/construction shows up in an East Village art gallery, likely from the ’80s, another room that is based on an art gallery. The exhibit comprises a series of gorgeous black-and-white photographs of polar bears as seen as specimens and trophies in public and private collections. Dion addresses the dangers and confusions raised by blindly accepting common assumptions because he believes that most visitors take for granted the science behind these uniquely “stuffed” bears. A closer look reveals our changing attitudes about these magnificent Arctic creatures. While presented in a proper scientific method, we can see an evolution from ferocious beasts to complacent pussy cats. Which presentation is the valid representation of these endangered animals? The images, a cross between research and artistic photography, echo ideas in the club lounge such as the thrill of the hunt, the desire to collect, and the representation of endangered species.

All seems to come together in the attic, which is set up as a research center/laboratory. Shelves cover the two long walls. Arranged on one side are glass jars and vessels filled with like objects, such as shells or claws from the natural world that might stand beside a group of manufactured Legos or pennies. Along the other wall are different kinds and sizes of boxes stacked on the shelves. As a pseudo-scientist or explorer, a visitor is invited to join Dion in his investigations by opening a box to examine the object inside.
What is the reasoning behind Dion’s collections and arrangements in a particular space? While there are some insider references, such as a section that refers to a series of museum-like installations by Marcel Broodthaers, an early 20th-century predecessor to Dion, the artist doesn’t answer the question, leaving it to viewers to come up with their own satisfactory explanation.

That is the beauty of what Mrs. Christopher’s house has become: the opportunity to throw reason out the windows, here carefully painted by Linda Wallen, an artist who resides in Troy Hill, to add another layer of intrigue, and let the imagination fly. It is the overarching concept which is mirrored in so many small details. This is also the thread that connects everything here, large or small, with smaller threads leading to details in the other art houses. Each art house weaves a story to be unraveled by engaged viewers who have made the trip up to the Troy Hill neighborhood.