The first time I signed a waiver before entering an exhibition was on the eastside of Detroit. On 3283 Dubois Street you stand in front of one of only two houses on the block. Up and down the road it doesn’t get any better. At most there might be two or three remaining structures on any of the surrounding city blocks. This is McDougall Hunt, a neighborhood so close to Eastern Market, Wayne State, museums and downtown its brutal state of utter abandonment would be unfathomable—if this were any other place than Detroit. 

The house on the corner of Dubois and Mack is an older two-story brick apartment building with window frames, cornices and a boarded up basement, all painted baby-blue. The entrance is deeply recessed behind a locked iron gate. Even with an appointment the place looks unwelcoming. Inside visitors step into the monochromatic world of ceramicist Anders Ruhwald. Once your eyes adjust to the darkness the textures of the walls and floors start to pattern your experience. Charred wood panels and blackened boards swallow the light of a few meager light sources, a candle in one room, a lone lightbulb in another. One empty room is tiled bottom to top with black ceramic squares. Even in parts of the former apartment that overlook the sunny urban decay outside the incoming light seems only to intensify the cavernous stillness inside.c

Ruhwald’s objects are carefully placed. They occupy a corner or a closet. They fill an entire room. They hang silently above your head. It is an abstract narrative that doesn’t fail to rope you in. As you open doors and wander about the unease of the deserted neighborhood creeps inside behind you. Like a careful arsonist’s masterpiece the contours of the apartment are covered with the soot and ash of a conflagration of massive proportions. Visitors turned urban archaeologists discover beauty and inner life in the shards of a once thriving part of the city.

tf.