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There’s an ocean under Moss Street.
It takes up the basement of a house on the residential road near the University of Oregon. It’s teeming with marine life made from reused and scrappy DIY materials: a spiny pufferfish, made from donated hospital “take-a-number” tickets secured to a beach ball, an anglerfish that is also a disco ball (her name is Angie,) and, of course, a large fish with lipstick and hanging mannequin arms to hug.
This is “In Depth,” an immersive, Meow Wolf-inspired art installation that will be open for one day only this Saturday, Aug. 1.
The art exhibit is the first immersive piece from Cindy Ingram and Sarah Breinig, a collaboration between a large-scale painter and a found-object artist. They have transformed a basement into an underwater scene.
It’s part of PorchFest, a festival-slash-walking tour welcoming musicians into people’s homes for low-key, intimate art popping up on Eugene’s residential streets.
The DIY ethos of “In Depth” gets at something Ingram and Breinig pointed to as necessary: a return to messy, human creation during the artificial intelligence boom happening today.
“There is absolutely no AI in this basement,” Ingram said. “In a world right now where everything is just so highly polished and perfect, and it’s sort of AI precision, a lot of us are leaning back towards messy on purpose: playful, whimsy, low-stakes.”
Building an ocean in a basement
For a little more than two months, the two artists have been turning part of a home built in 1919 into an art installation, transforming it into an underwater scene while also embracing its setting in an actual residential basement.
A sea of clothing will spill from the laundry machines, with shark fins patrolling the fabric waters — once Ingram is done with her laundry for the weekend a few days ahead of PorchFest.
Ingram was invited to participate in a community conversation with the Arts and Business Alliance of Eugene about what artists in the city identified as their top needs, and the biggest takeaway for her was just physical space.
As a fan of the immersive exhibits of Meow Wolf as well as James Turrell’s “Sky Pesher” in Minneapolis, one of the artist’s “skyspaces” that frame the actual sky with ceiling openings, she started to think about what getting something immersive done in Eugene would look like.
She figured: She had a basement. Why not give it a go?
That led to her reaching out to Breinig, an artist she was connected to via Instagram but hadn’t worked with before. Breinig, a mixed-media artist who often uses reusable materials in detail-driven, smaller pieces, said doing a piece of this size was not something that had been easy as a working artist in Eugene.
“Creating space to make art, especially large scale art, is hard,” Breinig said. “I’ve had an art space pretty consistently, but in the last year or so, I’ve been living in small apartments. We’ve been creating over here, and it’s been nice to have that space to make bigger stuff. I couldn’t really make bigger things without space to do that. It’s like an interest I had, but it’s easier to work on something small when you have limited space.”
‘A human made this’
Visitors to “In Depth” will enter into the basement via a side door, walking down the steps before stepping into the black-lit, neon underwater scene.
It is not a photorealistic ocean, and the installation’s different components are visibly handmade. In addition to the aforementioned lipstick-wearing hugging fauna (she has fish-themed protest signs, as well) and anglerfish disco ball, there are constant handmade touches showing work from Ingram, Breinig and other artists who contributed smaller pieces to the seascape: classic crochet granny squares for giant tentacle suckers, all manner of painted cardboard and papier-mâché marine life, the take-a-ticket pufferfish. (The tickets themselves are from a clinic where Ingram gets mammograms done.)
The ocean theme came first, then naturally, due to Breinig’s expertise, became a reused material showcase. It was Breinig’s suggestion to transmute paper grocery bags into ocean waves by cutting them open, painting them blue and stapling them into strips. In “In Depth,” those waves are near a kayak in front of a projected video seaside scene, and large fake flowers with eyeballs in the center.
“I think there’s something really special, and I’ve heard a lot of conversations around this recently, about seeing an artistic fingerprint in something,” Breinig added. “Like, ‘This is not perfect. A human made this.’”
The other part of the reusable material ocean is the pure accessibility of the art, both from a material standpoint and the basement venue itself. Ingram said she hopes the show is an invitation for people to think about how their own homes can house art.
“When people come to visit — and we hope that lots of people will come to visit — they will get ideas of what they can do in their houses or their yards,” she said. “Around Halloween, people do haunted houses, or they do like big spiders on their houses. But you know, you don’t have to have it just on Halloween. You can do random stuff.”
How to see ‘In Depth’
“In Depth” will be on view for one day only, from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 1, in the basement of 1864 Moss St., Eugene.
In addition to the basement art installation, there will be live music, arts vendors and aerial silk performers on the lawn and porch of the home and in an adjacent yard.
