Hole2010—2020
Made with recycled wood from torn-down houses in Chicago, Hole's stacked layers were built to rise and expand centrifugally until its growth was stopped by whatever constrained it in the space it occupied. The original Hole, built in my second floor studio on the West Side of Chicago, measured 7’ x 17’ x 17’, seventeen feet being the typical width of warehouse spaces built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries based on the distance that (wooden?) joists could span. Hole was exhibited at Threewalls Gallery in Chicago in 2012 as part of a solo exhibition "Still, yet, else, further, again..." and (again) in Chicago in 2013 at Hairpin Gallery as part of a group exhibition "The Presence of Absence." In 2016, Hole traveled by container ship to Leigzig, Germany, where it was exhibited in "Schichten," a group show curated by Lena von Geyso and Elisabeth Pichler for D21 Gallery, conceived in relation to the still active coal mines outside Leipzig, and later Hole was exhibited at the Haus der Kunst in Munich as part of "The Big Sleep" in 2019. In 2020, Hole was "closed" -- its expansiveness turned inward -- in response to an invitation to become part of a permanent public art project conceived by Bernd Zimmer called STÖA169 in Pölling, Germany.