Entrance to an Invisible House

Kendra Thornburgh-Mueller
Entrance to an Invisible House
2021
Found wooden door, acrylic paint, spray paint, oil pastel
80 x 32 x 7.5
$2,500

Kendra Thornburgh-Mueller is a mixed media artist studying at the University of Chicago. They are currently focused on working in abstract drawing and ceramic sculpture. Entrance to an Invisible House is a distinct exploration in scale and perspective.

Entrance to an Invisible House stands upright, so the viewer has the freedom to move around the piece. Doors normally act as flexible boundaries—both dividing spaces and bridging them. What happens when you remove the walls that contextualize them? Is this door open or closed? This isolated door does not allow the viewer to experience that moment of transition in a traditional sense. In denying the facile, tactile transition of swinging a door open into a new space, Entrance to an Invisible House forces the viewer to question if the door was ever really the threshold. Once the door has become the boundary and ceases to be capable of bridging it, can we still use it to enter a new space?

The artist asked for the door from Amber Ginsburg when they saw it at 6028 S Champlain, a synagogue/church she is working towards renovating into a carbon neutral artists’ space. Kendra was immediately motivated to create something with it, having always desired to work on a larger scale. They lifted it into Amber’s orange truck and put it in the garden of Otis Gordon’s studio he rented for the summer. They first tried drawing with pastels, which one can still see peaking through the spray painted side. It was a freeing experience; it felt like being a kid again and drawing on the walls when they weren’t supposed to. The next day Kendra and Otis brought down a bucket of black paint and took turns making and connecting shapes until they had this massive, dark textured form. They thought it would be interesting if the other side contrasted it, so they used bright spray paint to create a lighter effect. Seraphina Halpern contributed by spraying a small house in the corner and some of the poppy-like shapes, giving the effect of whimsical smoke.