"This work would not have occurred if not for the character and dimensions of the south gallery. I was astonished to find myself standing in a room that was a gallery presentation space, but also the scale and proportions of one room of the house that I live in, in Chicago. It was as though I was stepping into a place that felt “at home”, but didn’t even acknowledge that to myself for a while; it seemed a bit presumptuous!

In the exhibition here in 2022, I took a first step by placing—what was then established spectrum— associated with six thresholds in our house—around the south gallery’s hearth from west to east, and east to west. Even the idea that a spectrum would surround a hearth was very warming. I took liberties, thinking about the warmth of occupancy at domestic scale. Individuals lived in this house; these were their rooms.

My work since 1991 has reflected the experience of living and learning from the house in Chicago. And this experience with ‘Hearth’ generated my interest in the overall structure of the parquet floor. The idea that there is a drawing of the room embedded in the floor in this perimeter double line… you know, that’s a gift… the sense of proportion in the border areas are not unlike the scale of the threshold between two rooms... I simply photographed the entire perimeter of the gallery space, and many details of the central floor, and printed and made a collage directly on the wall of my studio... I was interested in maintaining the sense of a cut edge. If one looks closely, there are clues here and there, a sense that there is a cut and an overlay. It was taped together, so in some cases, the haziness is the result of tape that was changing color…it's almost as though you can see the tape.

The center part is this color range because the ink toner was shifting, but also given the lighting conditions on the day that I took the photographs. The nature of the phone camera is to ‘up’ the color saturation. [The left-side edge] of the perimeter was very blue in the printed photograph; this became a kind of amusing code of the East River. In the living room paintings from 2003-05, south is up, and north is down. The south exposure in the house points up to the illumination that we have with yellow and red. So, south is up, east is left.

This became a kind of tribute to the lessons of Cubism, with the liberty of being able to move things around... a tribute to Cubism, now informed by the anxiety of gerrymandering: the power to change the perimeter of a county or a voting bloc. So, certain conversations during this time did address the making, or the remaking, to organize and control a space. It got dark—there were these dark corners, photographed at that time. So, there is, for me, this sense of what is lurking at the edges, in the corners."

—Julia Fish, 2026