During his residency at Artpace San Antonio, Sterling Allen has been making sculpture on a scale he hasn’t attempted before, constructing 3 full-sized playhouses from materials he finds on the street, in thrift stores or purchases from dollar stores. Replete with accoutrements like satellite dishes, chicken-bodied weathervanes, shutters and outdoor faucets, Allen uses an assembly line process to make each house “identical.”

Allen came upon the assembly line idea while on a studio visit in Kansas City. The artist he visited was busy making an edition of “identical” sculptures, but Allen could actually see with his own eyes the flaws and discrepancies that made each sculpture unique.

These nuances intrigued him, so he decided to create his own edition, knowing full well that the materials he chose would doom the perfect edition to failure. Each videocassette he uses as a roofing tile, each plate as a satellite dish, each ankle height boot on a mailbox has a different degree of wear. In effect, the mass produced editions of these consumable products bear the nuanced signature of the people that used them. The houses are just like any assembly line production, an edition made of editions, each unique in its own way, each scarred by the idiosyncrasies of the maker.

Somewhere in all of this is rooted the spirit of DIY editioning that Allen employs in his drawings of photographs, drawings of drawings of drawings and his sculptures of drawings of drawings.

Once the houses are complete, they will sit in the gallery space together. Allen will send an image of the little neighborhood to an art copying sweatshop in China and have an “identical” edition of 3 paintings made by 3 separate artists, “Artist of Light” style. The paintings will thus complete an edition of an edition of an edition. Depending on what the paintings look like, they will either lift the neighborhood into the realm of fine art, or deflate the spirit of DIY creativity, rendering the houses into soulless aspirations, like the now identical and defunct exurb housing projects ringing California and Florida cul-de-sacs: more used merchandise that no one knows what to do with.