Buying a home is a major life milestone, but it can increasingly feel beyond reach. Buying a home under the age of 30 can feel impossible, but you can do it. There are plenty of creative ways to buy a property at any age and within almost any budget.
It’s crucial to consider whether you’re ready for the responsibility of owing a home. After all, the commitment goes beyond the initial cost of the property and includes maintenance and tying yourself to a particular location for the long term.
Patti Warashina’s Kilns series subversively undermined the macho “cult of the kiln:” a phrase used to coin the sexist culture that surrounded kiln-building during the mid-twentieth century. As a ceramics student at the University of Washington, Warashina observed that kiln-building lessons were directed towards men, while surface decoration was the jurisdiction of women. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Patti Warashina, Gold Finger→
If you’re going to be visiting the Whitney Museum, walking on the High Line, or otherwise spending time in the Meatpacking District, make sure to find your way to Gansevoort Plaza, (located between Ninth Avenue and Gansevoort Street) to check out a new Public art installation, Bombora House, by Brooklyn-based artist Tom Fruin. An internationally known sculptor whose work has been featured across NYC, and written about here on The ‘Gig, Fruin’s work can be seen as a celebration of human behavior and everyday life.
“If you really want to understand what makes up the fabric of people and places, you often learn all you need to by looking at the floor,” says Fruin of his approach. Reusing collected fragments of street and retail signage, disposed theater props, plastics and metals, Fruin creates something beautiful from nothing. Fruin refers to this process as “quilting,” whereby discarded items are brought together to create a map of life. With Bombora House, Fruin conveys messages of hope, stability and joy in the sculptural interpretation of a home and a suggestion to look at our surroundings with a fresh perspective.
In the exhibit The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin challenges the notion that the past is a fixed object, waiting to be elucidated. He calls the present “a waking world, a world to which that dream we name the past refers.” The dream quality of the past suggests that is is mutable, a patchwork of images and symbols that can be understood in myriad ways.”
The late artist Mike Kelley’s work has also focused on the unreliability of memory. His project, Mobile Homestead, a full-scale reproduction of his suburban, childhood home, resides on the grounds of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Detroit. The building’s first floor maintains the floor plan of the original, but its multilevel basement, closed to the public, includes crawl spaces and rooms that can only be accessed through ceiling hatches.
The dreamlike, labyrinthine architecture suggests the slipperiness of the past. Kelley explores the denial of uncomfortable realities of abuse and oppression in domestic life, not in tune with the American Dream as represented by the suburban home, with its white picket fence. This lamp, a miniaturized version of the building, adds another layer of surrealness to the house.
Mobile Homestead Swag Lamp, Installation View
Photographed as part of the exhibit, The Arcades Project: Contemporary Art and Walter Benjamin, on Exhibit at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan Through August 6th, 2017.
If it happens to be a beautiful summer day in the city, and you really wish you had access to a rooftop with a killer view of Central Park, why not head over to The Met and visit Cornelia Parker’s Transitional Object (PsychoBarn), which will be installed at the museum’s roof garden through the end of October, 2016? Yes! Why Not!?
The Psychobarnis, of course, a not-to-scale copy of the iconic Bates House from the Alfred Hitccock thriller, Psycho— a house which itself was inspired by an Edward Hopper painting. How meta.
Downside: It is not easy to get photos of the Transitional Object without people in them. These are my first world problems.
Geoffrey photo-bombed me, because he thinks he is clever. I got him back later.
Surprise! The House/Barn is only built on 2-sides!
But who cares? Look at the beautiful day we were having!
Cornelia Parker’s Transitional Object (Psychobarn) Is on the Roof of the Met Through October 31, 2016!
