local authorities in the spirit world shape shift through time (we call it evolution)
Frank Lloyd Wright Smith House, Cranbrook Collections and Research, Bloomfield Township, Michigan. Site specific two channel projection installation with dyed and crocheted vintage textiles.
16’ x 20’ x 10’ / 2020 - 2021
Contributors:
Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata (1st movement) played on Sara Smith's piano by Nathan Costa, Assistant Director of music and liturgist of Christchurch Cranbrook
Copies—castings of original Cranbrook Booth North Gate stone by Ryan Andrew David
Frank Lloyd Wright Smith House curator, Kevin Adkisson of Cranbrook Collections and Research
Photography by P.D. Rearick and Melissa Webb
Title prose by Stephanie Barber
The Smith House, a 1950 Frank Lloyd Wright Usonian home, was bequeathed to Cranbrook in 2017 along with all of the collected objects and furnishings with which the Sarah and Melvyn “Smithy” Smith family lived. These acquisitions were curated within the house by Kevin Adkisson of Cranbrook Collections and Research. I spent two weeks there in January of 2021, turning the living room of the house into a site-responsive, 2-channel projection and textile installation utilizing my found, dyed, pieced and crocheted doily collaborations. The piece had a different and equally relevant life in both the daytime and the nighttime. During the day, all of the details could be discerned and carefully examined, and at night, projected videos coated and activated the interior, transforming the inside as well as the outside, as the home glowed from the inside out.
