Seth Clark: Passing Through
Paradigm Art Gallery
12 N 3rd St.
Philadelphia
Showing June 6 - July 20
Seen July 10, 2025
The Leaning Tower of Pisa has new competition: A seven-foot sculpture called “mobile home” that’s leaning over visitors to Paradigm Art Gallery.
Clark's work: "Mobile Home" and "Wanderer 15."
The piece is part of Pittsburgh artist Seth Clark’s latest exhibit “Passing Through,” a whimsical series about homes on the go. Through sculpture, drawing and paint, Clark shows off housing stock with legs … literally.
There are old Victorian houses sitting around kicking their feet; skirted turrets balancing on tip toes; masses of shabby shingles running for the hills. Together, Clark’s imaginary subjects bring new definition to the term “doll house.” These houses are lived in, and, therefore, living things — at least in Clark’s eyes.
“Mobile Home” serves as the exhibit’s sculptural show stopper. Designed to tower above any average human head at seven feet tall, the statue of a house boasts a build that is both humble, like a boxy armoire or old barn, and bold, like a wide-shouldered soldier. It’s the most attention-grabbing work as well as the piece that’s paying the most attention. While other houses Clark illustrates are oriented forward in motion, stumbling into the future, Mobile Home’s gable head stares down at its own feet in self-aware fashion — and simultaneously confronts its audience at eye-level.
The home is hunched with age. It’s also positioned in recognition that so long as there are viewers to maintain its purpose, the house will keep standing.
Homes are colored by their residents’ interests. Clark taxonomizes abandoned houses — sad, sagging, leaking, peeling — alongside architectural points of pride like tiny cupolas and spires — erect, sprightly, playful — as a way of documenting the importance of personality beyond function. His collection is inspired by his own neighborhood of Pittsburgh row houses, suburban but full of character.
Mobile Home is constructed with particular poignancy; its body is made from the scrap wood extracted from Clark’s daughter’s infant nursery. That autobiographical element hits on the power that homes hold over us as the structures that both hold our lives and hold them up. Shelter is a responsibility as well as a timeline; whether we rent, squat or buy, we are all owners of our homes and our homes are our owners.
“Passing Through” is specific in its hyper locality and personal history. But it's also universally resonant at a time when safe, affordable housing is one of the most resounding issues facing municipalities across the country. Clark’s art is a commentary on the cycle of mortality and decay — as well as a reminder that within our lifetimes, there is always hope for restoration and movement.
