"This is how space begins, with words only, signs traced on the blank page. To describe space: to name it, to trace it, like those portolano-makers who saturated the coastlines with the names of harbours, the names of capes, the names of inlets, until in the end the land was only separated from the sea by a continuous ribbon of text."

Georges Perec

500 CAPP ST

In 1975 David Ireland bought a Victorian house in the Mission district of San Francisco. Together with the previous owner, an accordion maker P.Greub, he attempted to move one of Greub’s heavy safes downstairs—the safe slid out of their hands and dented the walls of Ireland’s new home. Instead of fixing the accident, the two dents were commemorated with museum plaques: “the Safe Gets Away for the First Time, November 5, 1975” and "the Safe Gets Away for the Second Time, November 5, 1975.”

Ireland proceed to strip down the interior, uncovering layers of the building’s history, from an elaborate signature left by the wallpaper artists to a network of pulleys and wires behind the window panels. The remnants of Greub’s presence, along with Ireland’s shed hairs ended up stored in glass jars and used as art materials. Ireland applied multiple layers of varnish to the bared walls, inviting the light from the street as a collaborator. Dinner parties and installations were held in unison, with no preference given to one of the other.

Over the years, the house became a concrete self-portrait of the artist, in which the artist himself was one of the ingredients. Ireland called his unorthodox approach to housekeeping “Maintenance Action,” and with each uncovered layer of the building’s history, he left a layer of his own—the products of leisure and work, and all the time spent doing nothing.

ASSIGNMENT 8: RECONSTRUCTION

Pick an obituary from Obituaries.com or any other website/newspaper. Avoid well-known people, celebrities or familiar figures.

Find a description that's fairly detailed, and reconstruct that person's habitat. You can design the page however you like: it can be a single stylized or realistic drawing of the apartment that represents the person, both in details and in the artistic approach to the drawing. It can also be a collection of images, an inventory of possessions or some other arrangement that would give the viewer an idea of the person who used to inhabit that space.

In short, create a portrait of a person without drawing a portrait.

Format: 8,5x11" vertical or horizontal.