Francis Cape | The Other End of the Line, 2010

The Other End of the Line, 2010

mobile home, curated exhibition

Commissioned for the Friends of the High Line, New York

I was impressed by the money available in Lower Manhattan to hire international designers to turn a disused rail line into a park resembling a disused rail line. It is a wonderful park. But it does raise the question of what is available at the other end of the line. The rail lines led upstate, which is where I live; the nearest park to my home is a mobile home park. Mobile homes and the High Line share an aesthetic of mobility (in the park all lines run in the direction of the track, the benches resemble bumpers, etc.; mobile home styling shares more with vehicles than houses), but in neither case is anything moving. In the case of the homes, they often move only once, from factory to site; there is often little mobility for their occupants.

So I decided to bring a used mobile home to the High Line park. I wanted to hoist it onto the High Line but they demurred. Instead we sited it under the High Line on Gansevoort Plaza, where the park begins.

To complete the piece the home housed an exhibit of upstate artists curated by an upstate curator, Ian Berry of the Tang Museum at Skidmore College. I asked Ian to chose artists whose work reflected the condition of living upstate, by which I meant the human rather than the natural geography. There were thirteen artists: Michael Ashkin, Richard Garrison, DeWitt Godfrey, Kenji Fujita, Matt Harle, Chris Harvey, Margo Mensing, Rebecca Murtaugh, Michael Oatman, Gina Occhiogrosso, Ken Ragsdale, Nancy Shaver, and Alfonso Volo. In addition, sculpture students at Marywood University contributed to the treatment of the trailer’s exterior.

The mobile home was a 1972 “Greenwood” 12 x 60 foot model. It had been occupied by a couple who built themselves a log home and had no further use for it. After the exhibition it went to an expanding family who sistered it alongside their existing single wide.

Whilst I set out to make a work that brought a picture of upstate to affluent downtown New York, I think it ended up being more about the opposition author/authority. It was a sculpture that was an exhibition, rather than a sculpture in an exhibition; and the roles of artist and curator were reversed.