Powel House Garden Scene

…The exhibition takes as its ostensible starting point 1888, the year in which the inventor Louis Le Prince created Roundhay Garden Scene–the oldest surviving motion picture. Beginning with this touchstone moment in cinematic history and extrapolating in the unknown future of 2089, the four videos in the exhibition–each in a different room–act as skewed mirrors of the products of historical interpretation.

…Located in the front room of the first floor, this video takes its name from Le Prince’s film, but through special effects imagines what the house would be like if the garden and nature overwhelmed the architecture.

A Pigeon’s History of the United States

In the dining room, the reclaiming of the site by the non-human continues, in a video whose title is a play on Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. Both of the first floor works have strong echoes of the real history of the Powel House prior to restoration work beginning in the 1930’s.

Minuet (Room On Room Action)

In the second-floor ballroom, Hironaka and Suib move away from images of dereliction, and examine restoration and reproduction. When the Powel House was an industrial site, all the original components of this room were moved to the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The house itself now contains a complete reproduction. By combining footage of both sites, Hironaka and Suib playfully conduct a structuralist investigation of authenticity and representation.

Hippy Party

Finally, in the second-floor withdrawing room–an intimate space for conversation that contains silhouettes of 18th century revolutionary radicals Washington and Franklin–Hironaka and Suib look back to the 1960’s to help activate a consideration of dissent and revolt throughout the centuries.

-Robert Wuilfe, curator


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