The Hyde Park Art Center’s main gallery is usually your standard exhibition space: well lit, airy, and whitewashed to its lofty ceiling. But these days, unsuspecting visitors open the door and step into musty, claustrophobic semidarkness. Overhead, a solid wooden structure fills the room. Held aloft by metal posts, it bulges down almost to the floor in two inverted domes. The space shakes with a loud, low rolling sound, punctuated now and then by a tremendous clattering impact. A spiral staircase twists up and out of sight. At its top, all becomes clear–the strange scene below is the underside of a skateboarding bowl.
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The bowl is the latest project of the Simparch collective, a group of four artists who met and joined forces in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in 1996. Working mostly with salvaged materials, they’ve built internationally shown pieces–among them a mobile home made of sticks and plastic, a trailer built from old billboards, and a graffiti-covered ark–that irreverently explore nostalgia, class, and other aspects of the architecture of Americana. (The group’s name is a play on the Southern California Institute of Architecture’s acronym, SCI-Arch.) “Simparch is a way for us to be hackers,” says founding member Steve Badgett. “We counter the codification that occurs in the building industry. I think a lot of the beauty of building is sucked out by the structure of work and labor.”
“The Simparch crew was asked to do large-scale murals on the banks of drainage canals that were frequently tagged with graffiti,” Badgett says. “We came to know it as a skate area, cleaned it up, did some work there…. And I picked [skating] up again then; that was three, four years ago. Since then, I would take my board along on Simparch projects. Just to relax, I’d skate around whatever gallery I was in.”
Badgett, who moved back to Chicago when the project was getting under way, says Free Basin wouldn’t exist without “the great spirit of the skate faction in Chicago.” He’d like to see the piece remain in the community after its current run concludes, and Alexopoulos says she’s talked to the Chicago Park District about incorporating the bowl into the skate park the city is planning for the lakefront at 31st Street.
