Hall’s current exhibition is located at the John Rowland Mansion just outside of Los Angeles. Just one month after meeting Hall, he connected me with Amy Rowland, president of the La Puente Valley Historical Society and a descendant of John Rowland, to give me a private tour of the site. I couldn’t help but feel spoiled rotten as I pulled into the driveway, the sun just beginning to set over the mountains. Rowland asked me how much I wanted to know, and I responded, “I want to know everything you want to tell me.” She laughed and saw me struggling to type out all of the facts she rattled off–“Oh, just record me, there’s so much I have to tell you.” Rowland and I spent two hours together that afternoon inside the John Rowland Mansion. I felt

as if I was a friend brought over to the family home for the first time.

I learned that the mansion was built in 1855 in a Greek Revival style, home to John Rowland, an American-Mexican early pioneer and fur trapper who settled in Southern California in his fifties–a massive feat for someone of that age. His first wife, Maria Encarnación de la Martínez passed away shortly after their arrival. Rowland is a descendant from the Martínez side; “That’s a whole other research project I have to do,” Rowland, an amateur historian, said.

The entire first floor included mostly original furniture arranged in a way that suggested we just missed the family gathering. The walls were lined with photographs of John Rowland and his massive family. Various ephemera from storage that were once objects of daily use were curated and displayed by Rowland herself. She provided the historical context to everything we saw and simultaneously painted a caricature of the man John Rowland was. Notably, he would leave money out by the columns in the front of the home for weary travelers who were staying in his guest quarters for the next leg of their journey. I began to understand House Museum a bit more at this moment–both a house and museum, not mutually exclusive. 

We then ascended the staircase to the second floor. Rowland told me tricks to discern which was the original flooring. I couldn’t imagine anything co-existing with anything close to two hundred years old, when Los Angeles seemed to be regenerating itself constantly. The steps led to a complicated view: stunning mountains in the distance, blocked by a factory next door. It is the City of Industry, after all, I reminded myself. Although I had spent the last hour thinking about the late 1800s, I situated myself in the present moment: manufacturing, distribution, accumulation, productivity. Right, that’s what John Rowland came here to do.

We turned left and entered a room; John Rowland’s bedroom and Hall’s exhibition space. The room was varying shades of ivory with indentations of wear and tear–almost a wash of time. The hardwood floor absorbed every drag and step and scrape. The room felt hauntingly massive as I entered. Dark cherry wood ornate panels sat flush with the wall above the baseboards in the left-hand corner, like two arms outstretched as if to welcome me in. These wooden arms flanked a closed door; metaphorically rich. My gaze turned to the right as I saw two more doors hinged to each other, a mirrored mimicry of the right-corner wooden arms. These doors stood almost impossibly, attached to no frame and devoid of their original function. I had seen these doors the whole last hour; they were familiar and yet completely unfamiliar. 

To the right of the doors was a fireplace slightly protruding from the wall, another entrance and exit of sorts. Next to that, a window. More portals. Beyond the curtained archway in the right-hand corner diagonal from the wooden arms was an object only described by Hall as its sanctioned name; On Rancho La Puente we dreamed that we were; functionally a chest of drawers where the archival tags read each word of the title, handwritten by members who preserve the mansion. I turned to look behind at the entrance to the bedroom–there it was: the didactic. A brass engraved plaque that read:

A place to lay his head

Evan Curtis Charles Hall

The didactic signified the presence of an art object, yet the objects just described were furniture that already existed within the home; John Rowland’s original bed frame, the same doors I walked through to enter the space. The objects lived a previously functional life. Right, we were in a bedroom and an exhibition. The descriptors were all correct and weighted in their own definition: all were artifacts and objects and works of art and furniture and impossible to be defined as just one. The bedframes acted as a frame, the doors as well–but what was it framing? Our view? Our interpretations? Was this what John Rowland saw each night before he laid his head to rest? 

It was at this moment that I realized  Hall’s intention: the viewer is not just passively viewing, but becomes actively involved in the exhibition itself. To reference one of Hall’s inspirations, Clement Greenberg, we are not looking into the framed works in the room, but rather, the room becomes the framework and the viewers’ position is implicated. In House Museum, the viewer is a part of the work, wrestling with the flattening of chronological time: the past, present and future existing simultaneously. 

The objects that John Rowland once owned outlived him. They can all hold the signifier of a historical artifact, an art object and a measurement of time. In the past, the bed frame was created for that exact functional use. In the space of the museum, it was still a bed frame, but slightly decontextualized. Was it still a bed frame if there was no bed to hold? What then did the object hold?  This query leads viewers to the future, a time synonymous with imagination.  Hall purposefully chose not to fabricate an entirely new object but rather re-contextualize these quotidian objects that hold a rich life. Through Hall’s imagination, the viewer can begin to step outside of that urgent flat circle of building new, destroying old, always improving.

_ \ | / _

Dreaming was an integral meditation for Hall. When he spoke of it, he had difficulty articulating exactly how to identify it–we postulated together that it was a sort of other reality that considers time and location, but not necessarily in the way that we might understand those everyday words. The mutual elimination of the definition of “time” and “location” put da Silva’s methodology to work, so that we could begin to imagine otherwise. We marveled that in dreams, in either the conscious or unconscious state, there will always be conditions in and out of control. Time, of course, was a complicated and collective experience in this postulation, as dreams can possess a sort of timelessness. But dreaming of the past, or rather, history itself is devoid and dictated by time. This was all a welcome frustration though; there was no need to cement an idea that perhaps was not yet ready to receive its definition. This line of questioning felt like a possibility. Of what, we both did not know. That has yet to be revealed.