In the semidarkness of the gallery is a rowhouse, its siding a pastiche of brick, clapboard and stone. Hinting at the absent occupants’ taste, floral wallpaper lit by a bare bulb peeks out of a second-storey window; downstairs, a bay window theatricalises an empty room where the wall clock is perpetually set to 6:05. Despite its illuminated ‘vacancy’ sign, this gently dilapidated home offers no entry; Donna Dennis’s Two Stories with Porch (for Robert Cobuzio) (1977–79) is about three metres tall.
The titular ‘stories’ indicate two floors as well as dual design inspirations: a tollbooth by the Holland Tunnel and a New Jersey home from a George A. Tice photograph. (The ‘vacancy’ sign, we learn in the press release, pays homage to Dennis’s New Jersey-born friend Robert Cobuzio, who died while she was working on the piece.) Too large for a manipulable model and too small for a habitable dwelling, the structure is one of five American vernacular follies that comprise Houses and Hotels, an oneiric show of the artist’s early installation works from 1972 to 1994. The uncanny architectures, four of which are displayed in a darkened room with a sloped floor, draw on various buildings, including those sourced from memories, photographs, fantasies and even literature. Houses, as Dennis’s evocative creations remind us, are always containers for ‘stories’: both as settings where lives unfold, and as structures that materially reflect broader sociocultural and economic narratives.
—Cassie Packard