HOME FOR AN HOUR...
It all began on Saturday, February 15, 2014 when seven couples each spent an hour alone in Adam Moser's Greensboro, NC apartment, #5. At the start of each hour, Sarah Martin took the couple's portrait in the space, and then left them, unsupervised and unsurveilled. Across the street, at a tailgating party for the audience of this unseen performance, Jacob Paul wrote an imagined account of the unseen action inside. At the hour's end, Martin returned to shoot an exit portrait, after which the couple joined the party outside to hand off the keys. While awaiting the next couple, Martin photographed the apartment's evolution.
What was a happening in Greensboro became an exhibit at the Phillips Gallery in Salt Lake City, and the source material for an hour-long theatrical experiment performed only twice and produced by the Flying Bobcat Theatrical Laboratory in a delivery van that held only two audience members at a time.
On the occasion of the December 2014 exhibition of the photographs at Phillips Gallery, Moser collected the photographs and stories into this limited edition, hardcover, full-color fine art book. The artifacts include portraits taken during the happening, as well the fictional documentary accounts of the couples in the portraits written during the happening.
Genre: Photography/Art/Fiction
103 pages
9.25x7 in. / Hardcover, Clothbound
Pub Date: June 2015
Publisher: Press Otherwise/MPMP
ISBN: 978-0-990-95550-4
This title can also be ordered through Small Press Distribution.
"'The stage is set: seven couples, one key, one day, one hour at a time.' This is how artist Adam Moser describes his collaborative interdisciplinary project Home for an Hour. In February 2014, Moser invited seven couples to each spend an hour by themselves in his apartment in Greensboro, North Carolina. The couples were given free rein to do whatever they wanted, with no one watching. Meanwhile, outside the apartment building, on the snowed-over lawn, fiction writer Jacob Paul (pictured above) was composing a story—purely fictional, and with no revisions—about each of them. In one story, a participant meditates on what the word common means; another story imagines a couple’s conversation while they sit in Moser’s apartment drinking a box of wine. Photographer Sarah Martin took photos of each couple twice: first at the beginning of the hour and again at the end, in order to document any changes the guests had made inside the apartment. One couple baked cookies while others rearranged furniture and performed other mundane tasks. Moser, who is interested in socially engaged art that is site specific, collaborative, and participatory, wanted to play on how personal spaces reflect the people who live there. The trio published the stories and photos in the 2014 book Home for an Hour, and exhibited the project from December 2014 to January 2015 at the Phillips Gallery in Salt Lake City. At the show’s premiere, the Flying Bobcat Theatrical Laboratory performed an adaptation of Paul’s stories in a van parked outside the gallery. Visitors to the exhibit were invited to sit in the van’s front seats and observe the performance. Paul says, "'Home for an Hour was like a massive practical joke that kept—keeps—yielding surprise gifts.'"
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
Adam Moser’s work is experiential in nature. From trying out for Major League Baseball to producing feature length documentaries Moser examines and celebrates situations and communities that are often overlooked. He has presented work at The Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Culture Center at UCLA, Grand Central Art Center, The Portland Art Museum, The University of Wisconsin - Marathon County, Raygun Projects, The University of Southern Queensland, Open Engagement, and Conflux Festival. He holds an MFA in Art & Social Practice from Portland State University.
Sarah Martin is a photographer, filmmaker and entrepreneur living in Nashville, TN, her new home after a decade of teaching art at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. In Nashville she pursues new projects and can be found most weekends documenting and drinking in honky tonks. She holds an MFA in photography from Yale University.
Jacob Paul is the author, most recently, of the novel A Song of Ilan (Jaded Ibis Press, 2015). His 2010 debut novel, Sarah/Sara (Ig), was named one of that year’s 5 best first fictions by Poets & Writers. His work has also appeared in Hunger Mountain, Western Humanities Review, Green Mountains Review, Massachusetts Review, Seneca Review, Mountain Gazette and USA Today’s Weekend Magazine as well as on therumpus.net, fictionwritersreview.com and numerocinqmagazine.com. He holds an MFA from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and a PhD from the University of Utah. He currently teaches creative writing at High Point University in North Carolina.