It’s not a dollhouse, it’s an homage to Detroit

There hasn’t been a shortage of interesting, weird, off-the-wall art coming out of Detroit lately. And this is no different. Local artist Clinton Snider has created “House 365.” It’s a small wooden cottage, modeled after some of the old housing stock still in Detroit. It’s an homage to when vacancies weren’t the norm. It’s small like a dollhouse, but don’t call it that. Excerpt: “House 365” is Snider’s homage to old Detroit. As the city pulls down derelict homes, the result is a gap-toothed landscape he finds haunting and mournful. So he decided to make his own weathered wreck, a talisman from a vanishing Detroit. (For the record, he applauds clearing out blight. He just regrets the loss of that turn-of-the-century clapboard landscape.) So what do you do with a tiny house that looks like a prop from the opening credits of “The Beverly Hillbillies?” First Snider thought he’d move the house every day and photograph it (hence the “365”), an idea he now calls “far-fetched.” Instead, he presented the house at an opening last year at Hazel Park’s Tank gallery and invited visitors to sign up for a month’s “deed” to the property. And that’s how the wee house landed in artist Mary Fortuna’s front yard in Royal Oak. “I was totally engaged with the sweetness of it,” she says. “It’s like Clint’s paintings in 3-D.” Read the entire article here.