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Photographs by Lauren F. Adams
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You can do a lot with 400 yards of fabric: Galvanize a dying neighborhood. Deal with issues of abandonment. Pretty up a house. And soften the, er, hardscape of its architecture.
New York artist Leeza Meksin was tired of architecture getting perceived, and classified, as masculine. She wanted to dress an old, straight-edged redbrick house in an outfit, genderize it. So she designed a blingy gold-on-white print and had it custom-made in Spandex.
Meksin loves Spandex—not only because it’s more durable than rubber, but because it’s so flexible. (Its name came from shuffling the letters in “expanse.”) She hoisted one edge of the Spandex up to the roof of curator Lauren Adams’ rented two-story rowhouse in Benton Park West. Then she pulled it tight.
Adams, an artist who’s an assistant professor at Washington University’s Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts, co-founded Cosign Projects of St. Louis in 2009. She and her partner regularly invite other artists to do projects at their house—but they’re usually banners, not entire wrappings. When the fabric for Meksin’s House Coat exhibit started going up, neighbors stopped short and squinted, or parked their cars and walked over.
“When you cover something up, you actually reveal something bigger,” Adams murmured yesterday afternoon. “When you conceal something, you are actually calling it out even more.”
Meksin wants to call out quite a lot. There’s gender—how does the masculinity of architecture affect the way we design and live? There’s also the joy of racial diversity; the ugliness of abandoned, foreclosed, and city-owned houses; the response of the city to the Benton Park West neighborhood. There’s similarity and difference, imprisonment and fame, costume and nakedness and dressing in drag. There’s even the experience of Meksin’s own family: Her parents were Russian Jews who left their homeland for political reasons when she was 12.
While she was up on the roof anchoring fabric, a preacher came by: He’d been reflecting on the way we chain ourselves to certain ideologies, or feel chained by others when really we’ve created the bondage ourselves. Thanks to Meksin’s installation, he now has a visual for this Sunday’s sermon.
She chose gold on white as an hommage to hip-hop, an instant fabulousness, a reference to royalty, and a brilliant contrast to the murky brick around it. She’s done all this, and she still has 400 yards of fabric left over. The South Korean fabric factory had a minimum order of 800 yards. So who knows—maybe housewrapping will become a trend?
“A faculty member who teaches sustainable textures got very interested,” notes Adams. “Others have wondered how much the Spandex will insulate the house. And a lot of architects have been thinking about how skins applied to a building can change the color and intensity of light. Inside, it’s now a cool, almost UV violent-white hue.
The exhibit opens at 4 p.m. today at 2733 Arsenal, and a free house party, free and open to the public, will continue all evening. The wrap won’t go away until April 18—or later, given how durable that Spandex is.
