Wandering around this quiet residential area of ​​Pittsburgh, you’d never know there was a (taxed) bear inside one of the houses. Or a full-size lighthouse. Or a secret passage through the fireplace.

There is vinyl siding on the outside. But inside the four Troy Hill Art Houses are art installations that immerse visitors into four different worlds.

The latest work, “Miss Christopher’s House,” to open this fall, is by conceptual artist Mark Dion, whose work has been exhibited at Tate Modern and New York’s Museum of Modern Art. He is known for thinking about how we collect and display objects, what they say about us, and how we think about the past.

Dion said she created “Miss Christopher’s House” as a time machine. And indeed, inside, visitors discover several different period rooms: there is a medieval door hiding a stuffed bear with a broken chain, sleeping on a bed of straw; A re-creation of a 1960s living room decorated for Christmas; and a 1990s art gallery with piles of mail on his desk and photographs of stuffed polar bears on display in natural history museums around the world.

There is also the “Extinction Club”. The entire wallpaper consists of drawings of extinct animals such as the woolly mammoth and the Tasmanian tiger. In the corner there is a cage with an open door; And a dead canary at the bottom.

“This references very much the miners’ canary tradition,” Dion said. “And you know, when the bird stops singing, something is very wrong.”

Rebecca Kiger / Troy Hill Art Houses

/

Troy Hill Art Houses

A visit to Japan

Dion and three other artists were tasked with creating artwork that spanned the entire home. Troy Hill Art Houses by collector Evan Mirapaul. In 2007, Mirapaul visited Naoshima, an island in the sea. Transforming shores of Japan seven of the abandoned houses to “art houses”.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen another place where an artist can engage with an entire building and the work belongs to the entire building,” Mirapaul said.

He also said he liked the fact that art houses were in a residential area. “If you walk down a small street, you’ll see Mrs. Nakashima working in her garden. Then the house next door becomes James Terrell’s house. In a way, it kind of coexisted in a way that I think is both.” satisfying and important.”

When he moved from New York to Pittsburgh, he said, “I stole the idea wholesale… and started inviting people.” “And here we are.”

A working lighthouse

The houses are intended to be permanent facilities rather than temporary gallery exhibitions. That’s one of the reasons why artists Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis chose to build a full-size, working lighthouse inside their given Pittsburgh home, which they called “Dark House Lighthouse.”

“I come from Cornwall, where the lighthouse is a very familiar piece of architecture,” Clayton said.

Lewis added that they wanted to build something that could serve a function in the future. “So we came up with the idea that in 300, 500 or five years, when the ocean rises, this lighthouse might be unveiled as a sort of time capsule.”

The ocean could come to the door of the lighthouse, the light could be activated and “become a beacon,” Clayton said.

Visiting Troy Hill Houses

Tyler Banash / Troy Hill Art Houses

/

Troy Hill Art Houses

All four houses – “Miss Christopher’s House”, “Dark House Lighthouse”, “Kunzhaus” by Polish artist Robert Kuśmirowski and German artist Thorsten Brinkmann “La Hütte Royal” (with the secret passage) is open to the public free of charge. by appointment. Curators guide visitors through the houses.

The tours last about an hour each, but Mirapaul said they should be watched repeatedly.

“People ask me how I choose different artists for tracks? I don’t have exact criteria,” Mirapaul said. “But one of the things that is so important to me is when an artist can create a work that is layered and complex enough to reward multiple visits.”

People come back “two, three, five, eight times,” he said. “And that excites me.”

Rebecca Kiger / Troy Hill Art Houses

/

Troy Hill Art Houses

Edited for broadcast and digital Ciera Crawford. Release story mixed Chloe Weiner.

Copyright 2024 NPR