(In other news, 1708 Gallery’s outgoing executive director Tatjana Beylotte gave the organization a lovely parting gift: a $60,000, two-year grant from the Warhol Foundation to support exhibitions and educational programming.)
Each piece in "Reflecting and Collecting" is a response to art within the permanent collection of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
The octagonal house in front of Linden Row is a miniature of an earlier concept by Craig Pleasants, program director for the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, an idyll for makers and creators near Amherst, Va. Some years ago, a larger version was home for Pleasants and his wife, Sheila (the VCCA’s artist service director). They lived in the unique cabin for three years. “It’s about 400 square feet and a sleeping loft,” Pleasants says.
The house still stands at the foot of the North Carolina portion of the Appalachian Trail near Tryon, N.C. “We lived there, just the two of us,” he explains. “When we first moved in, no running water but always electricity. First year, we got a well and running water, then added a bathroom on the side in an 8-by-8-foot room. Each side of this octagon is 8 feet long.”
Sheila’s brother wryly dubbed it “The Octagonal Living Unit,” and the name stuck, hence the piece’s title, Octagonal Living Unit 2.0.
The Pleasants later moved to New York City, and the necessities of their growing family transformed the OLU into a vacation house for five people.
A few years ago, Pleasants considered marketing the OLU as a kit. He partnered with Charlottesville architect Alan Scouten. Scouten’s interest then and now was prefabrication using a building material called Thermasteel. The durable material, made of steel and expanded polystyrene, holds up well in extreme conditions. And in the case of the OLU, with its octagonal shape, winds blow around the structure rather than providing a sail-like surface.
Pleasants thought the OLU could serve purposes ranging from a guesthouse to an emergency disaster shelter. Recent earthquake crises in Chile, China and Haiti caused Pleasants to revisit his OLU idea and fit it in the context of the exhibit.
In terms of VMFA inspiration, he chose Robert Gwathmey’s Family Portrait, which presents an African-American family sitting on the front porch of a shotgun house, and the color stripes of Brice Marden’s Meritatio.
This unit, says Pleasants, can be assembled in a few hours, and it benefits from still being quite useful years on, unlike much emergency or transitional housing. For about $50,000, it would be possible to manufacture, crate and ship 10 of these units (complete with roof) to Port-au-Prince. Which is what he’s offering to do with the proceeds if someone purchases the Linden Row model.
But Pleasants isn’t an NGO, or even Sean Penn, so he needs to know that if the OLUs get sent, somebody on the other end would see to their construction. He's made queries but has found it difficult to locate someone on the ground with the infrastructure to utilize the OLUs. According to Plesants, “It’s been six months since the earthquake, and less than 4,000 transitional houses have been provided for 2 million left homeless.”
