A Room of One's Own (2002)

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Marge Pacer's voice comes on, describing her box as a portrait of the art-deprived hiatus that followed her childhood love of drawing. "I never had the courage to draw" as an adult, she says, until age forty-seven. Her joyful abstract box shows three pillars, each sporting a paper cutout rose. Scriptlike twirls and spirals, drawn when the paint in the pale painted background was still wet, float above a floor of red paper tiles. They're daubed with what look like lipstick kisses in lime green, burgundy, and robin's-egg blue.

Pam Campau speaks painfully of infertility, which gave her time for creativity but which also created loneliness. Her box shows a cozy nest set against an empty blue sky. Instead of eggs, a handful of used pastel crayons lines the nest.

I parted the curtains of Peep Show to see cheerful spray-painted marshmallow chicks, or "peeps," perched insouciantly here and there in a cozy blue room with a fireplace. The lighthearted pun summed up the verve radiating from all of the boxes, on display through October 4.   

[Originally published in October, 2002.]