Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
The gallery’s tag line is “artgallery. thoughtsalon. creativeturningpoint.” Its metaphor is the hinge: a tiny bit of metal that joins two things together and facilitates the opening of doors.
The Hinge’s literal door swings open into an apartment in a historic Central West End building, one with an unusual layout. The apartment has a long, grand hallway (sometimes called a “spinal chamber”), with rooms branching off either odd side. The organizers—curator and artist Lauren Pressler; fine-art furniture dealer and antiques-restoration specialist Bryan Laughlin; and poet, writer, and Washington University lecturer Eileen G’Sell—see it as not just a gallery, but also a space to be activated in myriad ways. The idea came about, Laughlin says, because an earlier apartment he and Pressler shared always had interesting objects passing through it; neighbors and friends kept drifting through the door to see what was new.
“We got this idea, based on all this interaction we were getting, and also because I was using the apartment as a storage facility, and I research my [furniture] pieces there,” Laughlin says. “So this idea got born one night, over some wine…”
The Hinge’s first official exhibit, a group show titled “Curiouser and Curiouser,” opened in mid-October. Guest curator Rick Ege of R. Ege Antiques contributed some wonderfully odd objects (including a glass cloche of white wax Victorian mourning fruit), which mingled with contemporary art, including Jieun Kim’s kinetic, fluorescent cityscapes; Alexandra Opie’s modern daguerreotypes; and Oregon sculptor Heidi Pruess Grew’s ceramic figures of imaginary animals. On opening night, as experimental composer Barron K. Johnson filled the apartment with skwonky tones, it felt like passing through an altered reality (until you popped into the very sleek, functional kitchen for something to drink).
What makes The Hinge different from other apartment galleries is how deliberately it calls attention to itself as domestic space, down to the hardware reference in the name. The furniture and accessories aren’t just incidental—they play a crucial role, equal to the visual art (which Pressler curates) and the literature (which G’Sell organizes through a monthly reading series). Last September, novelists Teddy Wayne and Eric Lundgren read in one of the sitting rooms, in front of an elegant white fireplace, its mantel topped with an antique mirror in a gilded frame.
“The whole room was set up with these gorgeous chairs, Bryan’s chairs,” G’Sell explains. “They were even out in the hallway.”
“I think there were more kinds of chairs represented than there were people,” Laughlin jokes.
By making the chairs part of the experience, the encounter with both literature and furniture was made more interesting. G’Sell says they want to deviate from the white-box standard gallery space, a topic the founders discussed last spring during the Regional Arts Commission’s “Rustbelt to Artist Belt” conference. They sat on a panel about alternative arts spaces, along with Galen Gondolfi of Fort Gondo Compound for the Arts and Francesca Wilmott from the late Los Caminos, exploring what that might mean. For now, G’Sell says they want to be old and new at the same time, representing a wide range of artists and writers. The space’s openings so far have attracted diverse audiences, everyone from grad students to grande dames in their ninth decade.
“We want to both emulate what the other apartment galleries are doing,” G’Sell says, “and do something different.”
For more information, including directions to the gallery, visit thehingestl.com or call 314-535-3010. For photos of the gallery and the latest on scheduled exhibits and readings, go to facebook.com/thehingegallery.
