Nest, 2015

Slavic Village, Cleveland Ohio

Site-specific installation in a vacant house, Cleveland, Ohio
Project: Rooms to Let: CLE
Reclaimed wall lathe, reclaimed blue stained glass window.

Organized by Slavic Village Development, the purpose of the event was to promote public debate over vacancy and the struggles of city neighborhoods in the wake of the foreclosure crisis and the 2008-09 recession. Nest asked the viewer to consider who might have “nested” here? I used the lathe from the walls of the vacant room to create Nest and inserted a blue stained-glass window into the wall of the house to provide a central point of wonder.
I conducted research at the Cuyahoga County Archives to find all the title transfers dating back to the original farmer who came from Connecticut. This land was reserved for the Connecticut farmers when fires had destroyed land there during the Revolutionary war after which King Charles II had designated a section of land in Ohio to be the Connecticut Western Reserve. I installed copies of the faded documents on the adjacent wall to help tell the story of immigrants from New England and later from Poland and other Slavic countries who settled in this neighborhood to work in the textile and steel mills of early Cleveland.