LIBRARYMUSEUM

1080 University Ave. St. Paul, MN, 2022-2024

Pioneer Press, St. Paul article Oct 15, 2022

The LIBRARYMUSEUM project aims to metaphorically open long-closed windows and give viewers a particular view to the interior of a formerly public-serving building fallen into disuse, including a library, theatre, and community space. This work is also positioned along an affected route in the extended aftermath of property destruction during the George Floyd uprisings, and while nodding to multitudes of expressions on protective plywood over windows throughout both of the Twin Cities, it reaches more directly to conceptual site intervention.

Each of the 7 painted panels (60×60″, acrylic on canvas) provides a different invitation to pictorial interiors, and the meaning of each image are explained on a website via scan codes on the artwork: The Theatre (Centre Theatre); The Oculus (Forgotten Power); The Staircase (Past ∞ Future?); Breached Entry (Modern Ruins); ‘Plan for a Monumental Library’ (rendering of original image by Étienne-Louis Boullée (1728-1799); Window Stuffed with Books; Chandelier in a Tall Orange Room (Transposed Histories).

The project was first installed at 5am October 9, 2022. A year later, I added 2 new paintings when the remaining 2 windows were broken on the University Ave side. On October 10, 2023, I did a second install also included 2 canvas reprints of paintings that had vanished off the building, as well as a repainted version of the Staircase, which had gone missing.

After a few months, 6 out of 7 paintings vanished, leaving only the Oculus. In a feat of total myopic tenacity, I reproduced all 7 paintings on 11×17 copies at Kinkos, and wheat pasted them up, as ghosts of their previous inhabitants, on New Years Eve Day, 2024. Pieces of the project still occupy the building.

Panel 1: The Theatre

I woke up one winter morning after dreaming about a cold, dark, black and white theater with a big ledge on one side. In my dream, I heard the word “Victoria” over and over. I looked it up online immediately upon waking up, and was surprised to find a theatre with that name, a few blocks down on the other side of University, though I’d never heard of it before.

Centre Theatre really did exist in the 1940s in the Rondo neighborhood’s heyday, replete with Mohair seats, inside the building at 1040 University, but it was hard to find information about, even digging through microfiche at the St Paul Historical Society. It belongs on my constellation of places I enter in near-lucid dreams, which turn out to be clues or cues about the permeable layers between planes or realities. I wouldn’t have known any of this, had it not appeared randomly in a dream first, and I guess history does that sometimes.

Panel 2: The Oculus

I imagine what it would feel like to enter the building and find myself standing in a towering space with a lonely skylight far above, bathing the room in a dim, milky light you can almost smell, where something is still living but mostly forgotten. A window within a window, the Oculous is a reference from Charleoi, an abandoned power plant in Belgium, which is about to be torn down, or is in process of. Maybe almost like this place. Unabashedly, I am filled with urbex FOMO.

The vertical blinds of 1080’s formerly operational windows now open to the ocular skylight, and the crumbled sheetrock takes on a magical quality in the diffused light, almost like being underwater, drawing you further in.

Panel 3: The Staircase

Vertical blinds are open a bit further on this window, allowing you to easily step into a sort of liminal utopic ascension point. The stairs are simple and easy to climb, and once you get to the blue part, you can fall right in.

There is a pipe hanging, broken, off the ceiling, up on the second floor, visible in the square window from the parking lot….but that’s a small matter in the face of such pure and unemcumbered possibility, isn’t it?

The Staircase is an invitation to enter the threshold, through the old yellowed blinds of bygone decades, which used to frame these windows.

Panel 4: Breached Entry

From the first side channel, you can’t see the chandelier yet (but around the corner, you’ll be able to.)

You can only see the forced entry and crumbled sheetrock around the library stuff

A white desk and its cubby holes, a folding metal chair

Ceilings that try feebly to reach out while sinking into dark shadows like bruises

cords hanging down, switches & fixtures

I documented the Breached Entry point by wedging my torso under the plywood plank, so only my bottom half was exposed, and the rest of me was inside, inhaling the dust of the eras, but only for a split second. I wish I’d gone all the way in.

Panel 5:Plan for a Monumental Library (re-rendering of image by Étienne-Louis Boullée (1728-1799)

I was attracted to this image for the sheer volume of space in the great hall, let alone thousands of books possible to fit in such a space, but I am even more drawn to the fact that this rendering remained in the hypothetical and was never realized. Couldn’t we do something like this again, now? Why not? Boulee was a Neoclassical architect whose work influenced many, and some of his ideas were fantastical. I wanted to re-re-enliven this idea and make it easy to look at, even in the rain at 1080 University, when getting off the train at Lexington, or even if you wanted to huddle up and eat some Spam after passing by it on the street.

Panel 6: Window Stuffed with Books

I’d heard in passing about the former library, and may even have a dim recollection of it (I had started noticing the building for several years before making something onto it) but it was my sister’s friend who told me about the books sitting on the ledge of the 3 windows facing University. Then, more people mentioned it on site. I couldn’t find a single image of this Lexington Branch Saint Paul Public Library, so its existence lives only in collective memory of Twin Citians. The three books featured here are in my collection, and I haven’t finished reading any of them, yet, but that doesn’t matter so much. Remember reading? Remember the feeling of the fresh, square, heavy book that would be yours for 3 weeks; the gratifying SLAP when the librarian stamped and added the due slip to it before closing it with gusto? The background of this image is old and unused; there are no librarians there, tending the window displays. It smells musty and it sounds quiet, maybe like the sounds of bug legs scurrying into the rafters.

Panel 7: Chandelier in a Tall Orange Room

And there is a same strange site from a dream: a tall, such a tall dark room in Stara Zagora, Bulgaria; carpeted, rust red colored, large rectangular columns reaching to the ceiling, in the dark

I borrowed the chandelier image from that train station and put the view of it in that room, so you can see it from the train, but also be in that dream i had

And see it the way i saw it when i peered through the glass of 1080 2 years ago

Drawn against the room with the crumbling ceiling and dusty mauve walls, the completely unrelated relationship between these two places that yet merged in my inner vision is how I entered this project.