with Excavating History Collective, Rebecca Keller

In an Excavating History Collective exhibition curated by Rebecca Keller at the historic Pleasant Home, I worked in three different site, the kitchen, the garden and with the geologic relations to the continental divide, which ran along the property line.

C is for Colonize

The role of the kitchen in a house provides us with social, familial, and economic information. The kitchen at Pleasant Home is stripped of the history of daily use. As a way to re-populate the kitchen with the notion of use, I made mnemonic dishes of cinnamon. Smell prompts memory and these dishes elicit stories of baking and family gatherings. By giving the viewer the power of memory within an environment that is anchored in the past, as all historic museums are, I aim to shift the power dynamic within the space to the present and towards the visitor.

Record/Erase/Recover
with Natalie Pfister

The grounds of Pleasant Home sit on the St. Lawrence Seaway Divide; one of the minor divides which separated rainwater between the Mississippi River and Lake Michigan. In 1892, when the flow of the Chicago River was reversed to create a disease-free water supply for the City of Chicago, the divide ceased to function. This remarkable engineering feat took over 18 years and $6.5 million dollars to undo millions of years of geologic growth. As a way to elucidate this shifting geological history, a single line of bricks marked the Continental Divide.

V is for Victory
With Lia Rousset

During WWII, the Pleasant Home was used as the local Red Cross station. The civic activities sponsored by the Red Cross included rolling bandages, knitting for the troops, collecting scrap rubber and metal, and planting Victory Gardens. During WWII, local produce accounted for 40% of the food supply.

In our current time of war, something we can do is ready our environment for food production. Visitors were invited to take a soil V, embedded with mustard (which draws toxins out of the soil) and sweet field pea seeds (which fixes nitrogen) and place it in their favorite unused or forsaken lot.