a vaulted room for future feelings
Two-part Solo Exhibition \ LillStreet Art Center | Chicago | 2025
Together, Let the Printed Walls Bleed Out and A Vaulted Room for Future Feelings trace a movement from inherited and fixed cultural scripts toward the possibility of open, self-determined space. The first body of work confronts the permanence of mid-century dollhouse interiors—miniature worlds imprinted with the values and stereotypes of their time. The second imagines what might emerge if those walls were wiped clean, offering a vaulted room where curiosity and future feelings could take root. Seen together, these works ask how the past continues to shape us, and what might unfold if we dared to reimagine it.
Curiosity has its own architecture.
What if all of the permanent décor, with all its coded violence, were wiped from the surface of the metal dollhouse?
A Vaulted Room for Future Feelings was conceived as an alternative history. What if the children who played make-believe with their 1963 Marx dollhouses were given a blank house instead of one with printed walls? What if they were offered a protected space dedicated to whatever they might become in the future, for whatever they might feel or express? That space need not be larger than a closet, but it carries deep psychological significance for anyone not conforming to the rigid standards of eras past.
A space free of pop-culture stereotypes is not without its own challenges. The unknown can be unpredictable and ominous, yet it can also be exciting and full of mystery. Most important is the idea that curiosity itself is rewarded.
The central piece of this installation is a 1963 Marx dollhouse with its lithographed decorations chemically removed. Every part of this room is configured from objects of the past or replicas of them. It is meant to be a place of reflection, where familiar objects are reimagined as elements of a freer, more imaginative future. The space is intentionally small, offering each person a private encounter with an alternative past—one in which, for a brief moment, they are less influenced by anything or anyone else.
What would American culture look like in 2025 if this had been the value system imparted in the 1960s and 1970s? What would it mean for our leaders—and for our society?
