Soldered brass, steel, 52 x 18 x 18, 2019.
Geisthaus is German for spirit house, the small dwelling raised on a post in Southeast Asia, built for a presence with no body and furnished with a tray at its base for offerings. The brass frame is a cube with a pitched roof, drawn in linear members with nothing between them. With no wall to shelter behind, the house is defined by its edges alone, and the sky, the room or the viewer’s eye occupies the interior.
The one event inside the frame is the howling dog cut from the steel floor. Dogs howling at what people cannot see is among the oldest folk signs of a ghost, and the animal is the only party in the work that registers a presence. The viewer, like the house, stays silent. Because the dog is cut from the floor, it is a void in the shape of an animal, and it belongs to the steel of the post and tray, the supporting metal, not the brass of the dwelling. The cry rises from the base into a frame far larger than the animal, built for something only the animal can sense. Anubis and Cerberus are the canonical canine figures, and both guard passages. A dog at the threshold of an empty house gives the dwelling the character of a passage.
