(2009) Dimensions variable. Blown, sandblasted and enameled glass, wood, plaster, electronics.
This project is about a round house in Massachusetts, built by Enoch Robinson in 1856, a monument to his (impossible) desire to visit another time and place. The structure was inspired by a folly called the Broken Column House, located in the Desert de Retz, and made to look like a ruin of a giant classical column.
I made a scale model of the Robinson house out of glass and showed it in complete darkness. A bright light in the center of the model projected the architectural details of the structure onto the walls of the room in an inversion that shifted viewers' perspectives from standing outside of a model, looking in, to standing inside an architectural structure, looking out.
A timing circuit triggered the bright light for only a split-second every minute and a half (the time it took to significantly dilate the eyes in the darkness) so that the inside-out projected house could only be viewed in “after-image" when viewers closed their eyes. The projection aligned with a window-like frame on the wall depicting the view from a window of the original broken column house in France. The framed image was a digital collage made from the French scenic wallpaper that covered the interior of Robinson’s house.
