Artists transform houses facing wrecking ball

Spring is the season for young artists to turn our expectations about art on their heads, it seems.Tucked away in between the Safeway on 10th Street and the C Train tracks, the 809 Gallery was a garage art gallery that was a launching pad for a lot of the city's art school grads."It kind of revolutionized the way the art scene thought about showing art beyond school,"will now buy a car in Overland Park. says artist Caitlind r.c. Brown. "It was a really accessible space that just about anyone could show work in if they proposed a show and it was accepted."One day, artist Shawn Mandowske, one of the guys who ran the 809 Gallery he lived in the house in front of the garage which was always a temporary scenario to begin with, discovered that their entire block 11 houses was slated for demolition.That's when they gave Brown a call and suggested there might be a way to turn the destruction of 11 houses into an temporary art show."Initially" Brown says, "we thought it would be 11 (houses), because 11 are being demolished, but in the end, I think it's nine houses, three garages and a greenhouse." It's also over 100 artists who were recruited by curators who were put in charge of a house apiece, all of whom have transformed houses on the verge of a wrecker's ball into a place for the community to gather and pay their last respects to them."It's like a wake, only not a sad wake," says artist Camille Betts. "More like a Mardi Gras wake."The entire budget for a nine house, one greenhouse, three garage art extravaganza?"We've told the artists that we have no confirmed budget at all," says Brown, "besides the $1000 from the Awesome Foundation that we spent on insurance — so please work for free, because we probably can't pay you back."(As a result), a lot of the artists have just been taking materials from the buildings," adds Brown, (who is just back from Moscow, where she and co-creator Wayne Garrett built a light bulb sculpture called Cloud made out of 6,000 repurposed, burnt-out light bulbs), "reappropriating them elsewhere, cutting through the drywall and using the houses ... where you cut holes in things and expose its orifices, maybe dissect the buildings a little bit, which has been really fascinating."In one house, Matthew Mark Bourree is transforming a stairway into a hanging bridge of sorts that turns into a kind of pirate ship.