PITTSBURGH, PA.- Troy Hill Art Houses announced Darkhouse Lighthouse, a permanent art installation and garden by Pittsburgh-based artists Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis.
Darkhouse Lighthouse becomes the third house in the neighborhood transformed into a permanent artwork commissioned by Troy Hill Art Houses. Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis, together spent four years designing the work, collaborating with architects, engineers, and builders to complete the ambitious project.
Visitors (15 years and older) will be able to fully access the installation to experience the unlikely juxtaposition of an empty dilapidated home and a fully realized lighthouse. Highlights for visitors will include climbing the spiraling concrete stairs up the tower, glimpsing domestic weather events through tiny arched windows, considering the multitude of objects in the cozy lighthouse keepers’ quarters, circulating around the attic widows-walk and the authentic rotating fourth order Fresnel lens, and exploring the blue grass garden with its 16-foot concrete day marker sculpture.
Taking inspiration from finding the core of the house burned out by a fire years before, the artists imagined a new structure captured within the still-existing frame. Lewis notes that the house is currently 879 feet above and 382 miles away from the nearest ocean. Said Clayton, “The lighthouse now is patiently waiting for the sea levels to rise and meet it”.
The installation opens on September 25, 2022, after which it will be free and open to the public indefinitely. Visitors can book appointments for guided tours of Darkhouse Lighthouse at www.troyhillarthouses.com.
Darkhouse Lighthouse was solely commissioned by Troy Hill Art Houses. Troy Hill Art Houses thanks Black Cube for the generous support in promoting and marketing Clayton and Lewis’ latest project.
Lenka Clayton (www.lenkaclayton.com) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work considers, exaggerates, and alters the accepted rules of everyday life, extending the familiar into the realms of the poetic and absurd. Recent exhibitions include How We Thought It Would Be and How It Was, Catharine Clark Gallery, SF (2020), Fruit and Other Things (2019) Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Object Temporarily Removed (2017) at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, Talking Pictures (2017) at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and … circle through New York (2017) at The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY. Clayton is also the founder of An Artist Residency in Motherhood, a self-directed, open-source artist residency program that takes place inside the homes and lives of artists who are also parents. There are currently over 1,200 artists-in-residence in 67 countries. Clayton!s work has been supported by The Warhol Foundation and The National Endowment for the Arts. She has received an Art Matters Award, a Carol R. Brown Award for Creative Achievement, and a Creative Development Grant from Heinz/Pittsburgh Foundation. Clayton!s work is held in public collections including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, SFMoMA, The Carnegie Museum of Art, and The Philadelphia Museum of Art. Clayton's work is represented by Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco.
Phillip Andrew Lewis (www.phillipandrewlewis.com) is an artist working in a variety of media including photography, video, objects and sound. His creative research often responds to historical events, psychology, and phenomenology. This work consistently examines duration, perceptual limits and attentive observation. Lewis is actively involved in collaboration with artists and various groups. Phillip has exhibited his work both nationally and internationally. He received a 2012 Creative Capital Grant in Visual Art for his ongoing long-term project entitled SYNONYM. He has also received generous support for his research from Headlands Center for the Arts, Culture and Animals Foundation, Center for Creative Photography, Foundation for Contemporary Art in New York, Fathomers, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Midway Contemporary Arts Fund, Tennessee Arts Commission, University of Tennessee, Urban Arts Commission, The Heinz Foundation, and The Pittsburgh Foundation.
Together, the couple have many collaborative projects on view in Pittsburgh, including an 8-foot bronze plaque in the Troy Hill Neighborhood supported by Black Cube Nomadic Art Museum, a street facing experimental gallery, Gallery Closed, and they will be premiering a new installation at Mattress Factory in Spring 2023.
