Darkhouse Lighthouse
A full-size, working lighthouse constructed entirely within a dilapidated row house, at 1913 Tours Street, Pittsburgh, PA.
The lighthouse, usually an isolated beacon of hope and warning, is hidden instead inside a domestic space. It emerges from the basement floor, and stretches four stories up, terminating in a weathervane that pierces the roofline. At night the rotating light is visible from the street below. A viewer passes through the work without retracing their steps, creating a seamless and disorientating journey into a house, through a lighthouse, out into and around a garden, then back to the street.
This architectural instrument will sit much like a latent time capsule in anticipation of being fully activated one day as a functional navigational marker once the sea level rises to meet the work – currently 879 feet above and 382 miles away from the ocean.
Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis’s collaborative projects include an ongoing video-based call and response conversation between one rock and one stone, a public gallery that is always closed, an 8ft long bronze plaque marking the history of their studio building over the last 600 million years, and a collaboration with 21 choirs to build a 524 voice crescendo.
Their work has been supported by Creative Capital, Headlands Center for the Arts, Center for Creative Photography, Foundation for Contemporary Art in New York, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, The Heinz Endowments, The Pittsburgh Foundation, The Warhol Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Rothschild Foundation and Art Matters. Recent exhibitions of their work include The Guggenheim Museum, The Metropolitan Museum in New York, The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, MU Eindhoven, The Broad Museum in Michigan, LifeSpace Gallery in Dundee, and The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia.
Darkhouse Lighthouse is open by appointment to the public for free.
