Curb Appeal
August 23-March 5, 2016 (+ elements of this project remain on view from the outside)

Curb Appeal is the aesthetic look or visual appeal of a location – lawn, porch, windows, door, roof – from the curb. For the 2015 Terrain Biennale – an exhibition occurring in multiple outdoor locations – Curb Appeal re-envisions the way people use their homes – lawn, porch, windows, door, roof – as potential intersections of community play, food production and artistic creation through artistic transformation.

Jim Duignan, A Plea for Playgrounds, 2014 and Public Podium for 6018North, 2015
A Plea for Playgrounds – a 12 foot seesaw requiring cooperation to operate – is the result of a collaboration between artist Jim Duignan, a group of elders, and Jennifer Gray, architectural historian at Columbia University in New York. Additional influences were Jane Addams’s Hull-House and the 1905 manifesto A Plea for Playgrounds, which draws connections between poverty, health, democracy, and access to playgrounds. Working with the elders’ stories of their youth, which often revolved around playgrounds as social centers, Duignan and Gray created A Plea for Playgrounds to galvanize awareness about playgrounds as community spaces. The seesaw and the podium, Public Podium for 6018North, encourage the public to reimagine the physical and social spaces of the public sphere, front lawns and porches as interactive zones.

+ Luftwerk, Degrees of Lightness, 2015
Diptych, three layers of transparency film, color lighting
By overlapping three separate gradients of red, blue and green, Degrees of Lightness reveals grey-scale. Placed in 6018North’s windows, the color changing lighting illuminates and shifts the spectrum of each hue. Luftwerk is Petra Bachmaier and Sean Gallero, who create art installations that merge elements of light with facets of architecture and design.

+ Moises Salazar, Gloria, 2015
Spray paint, acrylic on metal
Moises Salazar has created a mural on 6018North’s two garage doors working with Edgewater neighborhood’s youth. A recent ChiArts high school graduate, Moises is a 6018North Summer Youth Employee and is attending SAIC in the fall.

Sarah Mallin has created an edible garden on the roof of 6018North’s front porch and in its planters. The work is a public demonstration garden as an inspiration to encourage people to grow food wherever they live, even if in unlikely places.

+ Amanda Williams’ IIT class (Dea Ivanovic, Meriem Sakrouhi and Luis Yanez), Color in Text
Three architectural students from Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) will transform 6018North’s red carpet on the sidewalk and its front door. Dea Ivanovic, Meriem Sakrouhi and Luis Yanez have created a compelling sequence of spatial thoughts based upon color from the sidewalk to the Joseph Albers inspired door that connects the back door to Moises Salazar’s mural on the garage.