Main Gallery Window
Dream House: “Box Full of Letters”
2009
Furniture, wood, fabric, postal packaging
12’ x 12’ x 4’
As part of the group exhibition Detroit: Breeding Ground, curated by Chris Samuels, Museum of New Art, Pontiac, MI
Main Gallery Window
“Dream House: “Box Full of Letters” is situated in a gallery window that lights up when the sun goes down. It can only be viewed from street level: a passerby encounters a home interior overrun with mail, primarily consisting of credit card offers, bills, and student loan statements. By contrast, a television, desk, and bed represent spaces of domestic interiority associated with rest, tranquility, and privacy. Since the rise of digital communication, postal service has mainly become a commercial conduit for billing and junk mail. Lastly, this installation taps into Thompson’s belief in creating an “art for the people,” an art that offsets the elitism often associated with art being exclusive to an educated minority.”
— Curator Nadja Rottner’s wall label text for Andy T’s Urban Vision
Detail 1: Rugrats
Detail 2: Envelopes
The window display depicts a residential interior that has become inundated with postal materials. There are three cross sections: a home office, a children’s bedroom, and a living room/media room connected by dense piles of postal envelopes and parcels.
The Dream House series of installations, represented by this piece, are accumulations of found material that act as shells for interior domestic spaces. The series title is an homage to Gaston Bachelard’s ideas of oneirism and daydreaming as enabled by simple domestic environments.
In this age of electronic communication, my casual correspondences occur via the Internet. Postal services seem to me to be occupied mostly with commerce: billing, the ubiquitous junk mail, and parcels of goods that were purchased online. This installation addresses both the excitement of receiving a gift package or letter, the anxiety of opening monthly bills, and the blasé response to unsolicited materials.'
— Original statement about the work
Detail 3: Green Chair
Detail 4: TV
Other works in this series were Dream House at Detroit Industrial Projects; Dream House: Clothes Pit at Gallery Project; and Dream House: Sculpture at Paint Creek Center for the Arts. Works that followed after this specific piece were “Everyone Says ‘Hi’” in Toledo, OH and Debt Letter Office at the Stamelos Gallery Center.
Proposal Image to CSF: City Center Square Proposal 2008
This piece was originally proposed to the Charlotte Street Foundation’s City Center Square Proposal in May 2008. It was unfortunately rejected by the good people of CSF (shout out to David Hughes and Kate Hackman!), but I was able to revive the project in Fall 2009 at MoNA (shout out to Jeff Bourgeau!) What follows is an excerpt of the proposal:
“This piece would be the fourth in a series of installations/large sculptures that involve domestic spaces nestled within piles of homogenous materials, all titled Dream House. The first iteration was a mound of shipping palettes found around an industrial center in Detroit that also housed the gallery within which the piece was shown. The ad hoc arrangement and construction of these common materials belied the furnished interior complete with painted drywall, polished wood floor, and carpeting. Entering the mound of wood was a physical experience within a dimly illuminated space to accompany the visual experience of the exterior. The second piece in the series utilized an 8ft mound of clean laundry and also contained a domestic interior. With this piece, Dream House (Clothes Pit), the interior space could not be entered, only viewed through the window of the gallery. In this fourth iteration, Dream House(Box Full of Letters) would become even less physically accessible as a pure window display and operate on a more pictorial and metaphoric level than the previous works.”
— Andy T