John shot and cut an intervalometer sequence of the install.

FRESH Air Handler is part of the Dufalas’ exhibition Problemy, which opens at Haverford’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, September 3rd and runs until October 8th, 2010.

Some of their work can be seen at the Fleisher Ollman Gallery in Philadelphia.

The essay by exhibitions director Richard Klein was written before the work was actually installed, but he captures not only our process and the details of our research, but also the key conceptual turn:

The immersive experience that Finley and Muse have created—even though it is connected with specific characters and events—does not have fixed form, a definitive boundary, or a clear beginning or end. The video and audio channels are never presented in exactly the same relationship to each other, and the stories that are told overlap and merge with a landscape that itself constantly changes with the time of day, the weather, and the seasons.  Is the primary experience of the exhibition achieved standing in the darkened gallery watching a modern-day magic lantern show, or walking up a hillside, GPS in hand, to find a cleft in the rock that once sheltered a madman?  It depends on one’s perspective, and one’s view of what is real and what is not.

Yes, the primary experience should have been (and should be) of the fold that brings these times and spaces and stories together.  We hope that the technical, architectural, and geographical means multiply these perspectives, and that the stories themselves, of Sarah Bishop, the Leatherman, and Ridgefield’s celebrants, have a newly complex relation.

Here’s what we have in the storage facility as of today, in no particular order:

1. one large monitor, last used for Clockwork installation at Sweetow Gallery
2. 2 laserdisc players, last used for Winter
3. laserdiscs for Winter and Blacky
4. pencil shavings for installation of Blacky
5. two etched monitors from the Blacky installation (in stackable crates)
6. box of chains, last used for Catapult
7. panels for model of Spring (folding half-silvered glass plus 2 rear-screens)
8. chair for Blacky installation
9. truck mirrors (in stackable crate)
10. ceiling turner, last used for Winter (disco ball) and Catapult (chandelier) at the Headlands, modified for the installation of Catapult at Sonoma State University
11. train model (a building on fire) last used for Loss Prevention
12. 8 small pieces of wood, used for hanging plexi-panels for Clockwork
13. roll of blue paper
14. roll brown paper
15. roll of reflective mylar film last used for Catapult
16. assorted gels
17. white shelf, last used during Clockwork install at Sweetow
18. 2 wireless headphones (batteries included but taken out) [didn't see these 07.12.10]
19. boat compass, last used as prop for Winter [Jeanne brought this home 07.12.10]
20. SCSI DAT drive
21. box of assorted models (planes, tanks, trains)
22. disco ball from Winter [I thought we returned this to Billy 07.12.10]
23. large steel frames for Spring plus legs
24. empty box for a Canon scanner
25. empty box from the Aldrich shipment
26. Vanessa Marsh’s diorama for Sleeping Under Stars
27. additional parts for Sleeping Under Stars diorama
28. 2 powered speaker systems
29. rotating platform, last used in Sleeping Under Stars and Guarded
30. ceiling turner, built by Paul Swenbeck for Sleeping Under Stars
31. a box of catalogs, Jovial Tales for Tragic Sensibilities
32. a flat aquarium last used when shooting a projection piece for Patricia Sweetow’s new gallery (we filled it with milk)

Many of these items are on their way to the dump, the storage unit a false security: empty boxes, rolls of paper, chains, mirrors, various mdf shelves and miscellaneous blocks of wood, the aquarium.  Some items are indispensable, but only if we are asked to revive and reinstall an old work: Spring needs these steel frames, the etched monitors are unique.  Some items are almost antiques: the DAT drive, the laserdiscs and players, the monitor, the catalogs, the models.  Some items could be used but likely won’t be, a dry fount of potential: the truck mirrors.

Where do these things belong?  What part do they play when they’re otherwise lying around, unused?

We attended the Saturday screening.  The proof:

Here’s the Google Street View of the building at 4017 Walnut Street, Philadelphia PA.

Googling “George Kingsley Architect” brings up a few buildings in Chicago and Philadelphia but scant biographical information.  According to a New York Times obituary, he died in 1956:

Hendersonville, N.C., March 19—George S. Kingsley, formerly an architect in New York and Chicago, died here on Saturday.  He had lived here recently.  His age was 86.  ¶  Mr. Kingsey had designed warehouses throughout the East and Midwest and belonged to the American Institute of Archictects.  ¶  Published: March 20, 1956

Kingsley’s most famous building, the Reebie Storage Warehouse, warrants a Wikipedia page, but the architect does not.  Not yet.  Here’s the Google Street View of the Rebbie Storage Warehouse.  And a detailed description of the facade and an analysis of its Egyptian revival motifs by Caroline Nye of Blueprint: Chicago.

Though the Slought building on Walnut looks and feels like a bank, it was actually a storage facility.  Building America’s first university: an historical and architectural guide to the University of Pennsylvania by George E. Thomas and David Bruce Brownlee tells us the following:

4015 Walnut Street (originally Atlas Storage).  1926: George Kingsley.  ¶  The former storage warehouse is an exuberant exercise in polychromatic terracotta classicism by New York architects whose specialty was secure storage for shorebound summer vacationers.  Here in its windowless recesses the student editors of the Daily Pennsylvanian toil in subterranean-like offices, producing the city’s fourth largest daily paper.

Thomas and Brownlee too quickly pass over some interesting tidbits: “polychromatic terra cotta”?  Is there photographic or other evidence for this?  The facade is now entirely beige, whereas Rebbie still sports the color, likely painted and painted again over the years.  “Secure storage for shorebound summer vacationers”?  What is the history of personal storage as a business in America?  Does the art-deco classicism here and the Egyptian revival motifs of the Rebbie mean to connote the “security” of the tomb rather than the virtues of the Enlightenment?

Other Kingsley sightings:

1. This from the Forgotten New York site, Tour 32.

The Allied Storage Building was designed by the architect George S. Kingsley and built on [636] Pacific Street in 1926; it features blue and white ceramic medallions and other ornamentation. It was converted to residences a few years ago and renamed the Atlantic Arts Building.

Here’s the Google Street View of his building at 636 Pacific Street in Brooklyn.  And a link to an New York Times article from 2005.

2. And one more in Philadelphia, currently AC McDaniel Storage but formerly Wallace Storage and Carpet, found via PhiladelphiaBuildings.org.  Here’s the Google Street View of this building at 237 Church Ln.

3. And in the Chicago area there is a hotel, now demolished, another storage facility, and a few private residences.  Here’s documentation of his 1912 Plymouth Hotel, 4700-4714 N. Broadway, Chicago IL.

We found the houses and one storage facility in a United States Department of Interior pdf: National Registry of Historical Places / Inventory—Nomination Form for the Buena Vista Historic District of Chicago.

The buildings:

4. A 1910 Storage facility at 4015 Broadway, Chicago IL

5. A 1914 2-Story Residence at 649 Hutchinson, Chicago IL

6. A 1911 2-Story Residence and Coach house at 735 Hutchinson, Chicago IL

7. And finally—though we’ll keep looking—here’s a storage facility on Riverside Drive in New York, one that looks remarkably like the Walnut street home of Slought.  A New York Times FYI article by Daniel Schnieder includes this description:

The beautifully detailed, classically inspired building, erected in 1929, was designed as a furniture warehouse and has remained just that. Suffice it to say, they don’t build them the way they used to.  ¶  The warehouse was originally built and owned by the Lee Brothers, whose name is still visible beneath layers of paint on the Riverside Drive facade. It was designed by George S. Kingsley, the architect who designed several other historically inspired storage warehouses in Manhattan and in the Midwest, according to Christopher Gray, the architectural historian.  ¶  Viewed from without, the Lee Brothers warehouse is so splendid that for years it has been rumored that it was built for the Astor family, said Neal W. Eisenstein, a vice-president for Manhattan Mini Storage, which has owned the building since 1984.  ¶  The columns and pilasters mask a cavernous interior, containing over 1,000 storage rooms and vaults, built of thick concrete and steel and dispersed over 14 floors. Roughly half the floors are built below street level, far below the viaduct, and the current entrance and loading bay are tucked into the West 134th Street side of the building.  —NYT, 10.11.98

The Ridgefield 300th Anniversary Parade Route Multi-Cache didn’t work so well for them, perhaps because John led them too quickly through it.  But the compasses were a hit.  And they worked.

Here are a few documentation clips shot during our visit.

Visit the Aldrich event page for details.

The screenings are scheduled for Saturday, May 29 at 7:30pm and Sunday, May 30 at 2:00pm, in a program with short films by Lewis Klahr, David Wilson, and Bill Brown.

Juicy new publicity stills are here:

Download the complete set here.

A new project page for Imaginative Feats Literally Presented has been created.  John’s cover artwork for Judith Butler’s book, Undoing Gender, now has a project entry of its own.  The project page devoted to our residency at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center [PARC] has been updated.  And new installation shots have been added to the Guarded project page and the Flat Land page.