Haunted memory, darkened rooms, underground house party: these were the themes in the first iteration of Once Removed, where five artists took over a Greenwood bungalow this past February and filled it with art. Conceived by two Seattle gallerists—Zoë Hensley and Sammy Skidmore—the project transforms houses slated for demolition into temporary sites for exhibition.
The second edition, which opened June 13 in a house in West Seattle, could not have been more different from the first. Where there was darkness before, now everything was illuminated. A searing, crystalline clarity left little to the imagination.
Some of my colleagues departed underwhelmed, and I blame the sun. It’s hard to be moody—or pull off a polished look—in a house so bright (and a timeline so tight). But in the absence of ghosts, other themes emerged: uncanny valleys, veils, and voyeuristic videos that felt like peep shows into the secret lives of houses.
The latter was embodied in Hannah Simmons’s Channel Changer, one of the most dialed-in pieces of the exhibition and the most exciting video work I’ve seen in a while. Visitors gathered on and around a living-room sofa to flip through the dozen or so videos on a tube TV in the corner, using an actual channel changer to linger or skip (a luxury not often afforded to viewers of video art). Each vignette was filmed onsite in the house prior to the event: disembodied hands watering a plastic houseplant, gender-ambigious hirsute limbs in a bathtub weighed down by dirt and flowers, a woman on the toilet whose face is obscured by a Playboy magazine, or—my favorite—a television set being fed a TV dinner. A pair of arms wrapped around the screen from behind, shoving mashed potatoes onto the glass and smearing chunky brown gravy across the image of a woman licking her red lips. All this while beats from the DJ in the basement drifted through the floorboards, up through the horrible beige shag carpet, to mingle with the video’s soundtrack.
Nearby, Chloe King’s vaporwave bacchanal dreamscape took shape against the quotidian backdrop of mid-century wood panel, brick, and a built-in bookcase. The largest painting, Rager at Grandma’s, is rendered on unstretched canvas suspended over the fireplace, an ode to intoxication-as-life-force, packed with piss imagery and a pixel-trippy landscape framed with a video-game interface measuring health (or its inverse). Urinals and caterpillar-baby bodies glitched across the canvas, while one figure doused another with a firehose of booze. A carbon-black vape loomed like a tombstone. King’s work is a meditation on nightlife as a safe haven and space for becoming. Her statement, hand-painted along the interior of the bookshelf, could also describe the house-as-experience at large: “This work explores how temporary gatherings become sites of experimentation, pleasure, and collective transformation.”
Turning down the hall, I was forced to make a choice: divert down an unobstructed stairwell to the basement or step over a performer—one half of atm/overdraft—contorted in a doorway. I opted for the latter, entering the room just beyond the body, which housed girl closet by Beni McAllister and Isabella Rinald. The room was soaked, ceiling to floor, in periwinkle purple, the only furniture a small vanity (also purple) pressed against one wall. Suspended from the ceiling, a gigantic paper-doll mobile made from life-size recreations of infamous girl outfits twirled on strings: Bjork’s swan dress, Gaga’s meat dress, Brittney’s DUMP HIM ensemble, plus more zeitgeist-defining garments worn by Madonna, Marilyn, Winona, Beyoncé, Selena, and more.
Julia Monté requested permission to tear a hole between two rooms, hoping to cultivate some kind of real-life excavation. While the building’s structural integrity prevented the bashing of load-bearing walls, she achieved the atmosphere of burrowing beneath the weight of civilization by enveloping the bedroom with architectural fragments and quasi-archaeological artifacts made from Styrofoam coated in a slurry of sand, crushed glass, and pulp. A spiral staircase in the center of the room simultaneously descended and ascended to nowhere, while the walls, plastered in Monté’s trademark material sludge, dried to hardened glitter. The sheer scale of the piece, enveloping both crowd and building, felt like an inflection point in her practice; everything up to this point, a maquette for big work like this.
A recurring beat through the building, Cathy McClure’s exposed sections of walls filled with stuffed toys appeared in indentations, stairwell doorways, and basement nooks, as though conjuring the ghosts of every toy that inhabited the home over the past 90 years. Also in the half-submerged basement—along with a sun-dappled dance floor and DJ SOFIAAK on deck—Michael Higgins’s BadLuck offered a triptych video installation celebrating his family’s unusual penchant for tragedy and misfortune. Cryptic projections filled downstairs nooks with grainy reels of family footage that glanced off a glass shower door or perfectly nestled between two-by-fours in a narrow closet.
As in the first iteration, Hensley and Skidmore commandeered one room of the house for themselves and executed a minimalist-maximalist transformation that worked like a dream—literally. In February, it was a room drunk on red. This time, they wrapped the kitchen—every inch of it—in plastic. Plates, silverware, and coffee cups were set out on countertops beside breakfast accouterments: a jug of maple syrup, pans on the stove, a rolling pin. A snapshot of domestic bliss frozen in time, the yards and yards of translucent polyethylene wrapped the room like a shroud. Or maybe the goal was just kinky weirdness.
The glue and apotheosis of the exhibit, slinking and weaving through the building, was a performance by atm/overdraft, the burlesque duo of Kit Wyatt and Hannah Simmons (of Channel Changer). Their bodies twisted into slow-motion shapes for which there are no names. Mannequin-long legs in turquoise thigh-high stockings and yellow heels tangled and untangled while taking up space in a borderline-spiritual way, momentarily activating everything they touched. Their faces, half-concealed by mesh masks painted with large, unblinking eyes, were a masterclass in the uncanny. Being briefly trapped in the kitchen with Wyatt and Simmons as they splayed and draped across the sink and stared me down resulted in a moment of such sharp discomfort that it became the highlight of the night in my memory.
Upon exiting the house, the sun-drunk spell broke. So did the heat, as groups of artists, neighbors, and partygoers gathered under the shade of fruit trees to chatter and exchange notes. This part feels important, too. Even without the luxury of polish, there’s something loaded about the ephemeral possession of these old houses. For one evening, the haggard shag carpet becomes transcendent with aura, and a random stranger’s home becomes a place—to quote King—where we can drift toward something approaching collective transformation.
Once Removed 02 is open on Sundays or by appointment, until demolition. Check their Instagram or DM for hours.
