art

One of the real pleasures of designing tin box was imagining it as a house filled with works of art, many of which have been made by close friends. We're slowly surrounding ourselves with works that inspire us and remind us of our incredible - if far-flung - community of artists and designers. The most prominent work of art in the house is an untitled piece by Barrie Cline, a friend of Holly's since grade school. Barrie designed the ceramic, wood and gesso work as a site-specific project for our dining area.

Installed over the summer, just as we were completing the house, Barrie's piece responds to both the house and the park outside. It works both as a piece to be seen frontally, from the dining and living area, and glancingly, as when entering the house from the park or looking at the park from the kitchen. It changes constantly in response to the changes in daylight outside.

Barrie works in a number of media, including video projection, and she created a color image that, when projected over the piece, transforms it radically.

We recently framed this large Conté crayon drawing by Gordon Nicholson, a friend from our McGill days whose work looks at the disused and decaying built environment of the American South. Gordon, an enthusiast of James Joyce, overlays his drawings and paintings with handwritten text.

We're very fortunate to have one of Chris Puzio's early curio studies, which he made (with the collaboration of Bruce Harvey) while we were all students at the Boston Architectural Center. Chris's furniture-scaled pieces were conceptually related to his thesis project (a motel), and have led to two decades' worth of installations and site-specific art work.

While Chris gave us the curio study as a wedding present, we're not even sure we're supposed to have this work by Tony DeLeon, which we may have grabbed during one of his apartment moves. Tony is another friend from the BAC, who made these two mixed-media collages as a study about suppressed violence and domesticity during a design studio. He incorporated images taken from David Lynch's film, Blue Velvet, and started to sketch out ideas about how furniture and furnishings mask undercurrents of violence and paranoia. Maybe it's not the best choice for one of the most visible walls in the house. Or maybe it is.

One of the few pieces we own with a title, Symbols and Archetypes 1s, is a large watercolor by Peter Lang. Peter is an architect, historian, critic, theorist and curator whose graphic works explore cultural themes through allegory.