Home Is Where the Art Is

136 Alpha Street

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Caption: Inside with Steve (top); and outside with baby torso.

(Top) The Living room is all in white, white carpet, white walls and ceiling, but there is a yawning void in the far corner where the walls have been cut away to reveal a dark room beyond. But there’s something strange about that dark room, since it appears to be simultaneously outside in the bright sunlight and utterly dark. Right next to the cutaway opening is a window with the sun streaming in.

In the foreground, a miniature Japanese garden is arranged in a square wooden box in the middle of the living room floor. Behind the “garden in a box” sits a life-sized realistic sculpture, The Chef Steve, of a Chef d’cuisine, evidently named Steve, all in pink with dark sunglasses. His arms are folded and he perches on a barstool contemplating a large spiral whorl of metal mesh that extends through another hole in the back wall into the dark room.

His back is turned to the window wall that looks out on the garden outside and, impossibly suspended halfway through the jagged hole seemingly gaping in the wall from just above floor level to the ceiling, the sculpture, A Coffeetable Is Work, drifts out from or into the dark room on the other, other side of the outside wall.

A prosaic potted palm resides neatly under the window.

(Outside) A pink pickup truck with a small camper shell sits in the dirt driveway of a small dark-brown house with a flat roof. A utility pole stands close to the house and the grass is green in the yard. On the roof, a giant baby doll body with legs but no arms is upside down near the edge of the roof. It is the sculpture, Baby Doll.

Image from San Francisco Examiner Image Magazine, 1988

Photography Credit: Jeanne C. Finley ©

The Chef Steve © Judith Quenvold

© Alison Ulman 2001