Halsey Rodman constructed Gradually/We Became Aware/Of a Hum in the Room over a couple of weeks this spring, in Joshua Tree, California. “I’ve always wanted to make something you could go in and spend time in,” says Rodman, a New York–based painter, sculptor, and installation artist, and the incoming cochair of sculpture at Bard College. At smaller scales, Rodman has played with architectural construction in his sculpture and explored the blurry boundaries between interior and exterior landscapes, but Gradually is his first enterable structure. The triangular plywood and steel-frame structure sits atop a platform at High Desert Test Sites, artist Andrea Zittel’s compound for a rotating collection of experimental installations and performances. Gradually is three identical triangular rooms, each with a porthole and built-ins at bench, desk, and shelf height. The exterior and interior walls are painted dusty purple, fading red, yellow, magenta, and peach— hues that evoke what Rodman imagines as the color of the sky “opposite a sunset.” (In a humorous move, he asked a set of triplet sisters to each interpret the five colors and had the pigments mixed to their specifications.) For Rodman, the structure “was like a portrait of a self with a continuous interior and exterior. [The building] is a very strong image, like a body.” In the fall of 2015, it will be disassembled, and the walls will be opened up and displayed inside-out in the Manhattan gallery Art in General. The conceptual project has roots in Rodman’s fascination with the liminal space where one entity ends and another begins, and the impossibility of being both inside and outside simultaneously. Its cross-country voyage has a literal narrative too: Rodman is from California and has lived in New York for 14 years. “It was a real effort to bridge that gap. The idea of distributing the structure in time and space is related to wanting to permanently unhinge it in terms of its interior and exterior.”
Halsey Rodman
![Halsey Rodman](https://www.architecturalrecord.com/ext/resources/archives/features/2014/images/08/1408-Something-Borrowed-Halsey-Rodman-1.jpg?t=1456503525&width=1080)
Joshua Tree, California
Gradually/We Became Aware/Of a Hum in the Room, 2014
Photo © John Pearson
![Halsey Rodman](https://www.architecturalrecord.com/ext/resources/archives/features/2014/images/08/1408-Something-Borrowed-Halsey-Rodman-2.jpg?t=1456503539&width=1080)
Joshua Tree, California
Gradually/We Became Aware/Of a Hum in the Room, 2014
Photo © John Pearson
![Halsey Rodman](https://www.architecturalrecord.com/ext/resources/archives/features/2014/images/08/1408-Something-Borrowed-Halsey-Rodman-3.jpg?t=1456503556&width=1080)
Joshua Tree, California
Gradually/We Became Aware/Of a Hum in the Room, 2014
Photo © John Pearson
![Halsey Rodman](https://www.architecturalrecord.com/ext/resources/archives/features/2014/images/08/1408-Something-Borrowed-Halsey-Rodman-4.jpg?t=1456503571&width=1080)
Joshua Tree, California
Gradually/We Became Aware/Of a Hum in the Room, 2014
Photo © John Pearson
![Halsey Rodman](https://www.architecturalrecord.com/ext/resources/archives/features/2014/images/08/1408-Something-Borrowed-Halsey-Rodman-5.jpg?t=1456503585&width=1080)
Joshua Tree, California
Gradually/We Became Aware/Of a Hum in the Room, 2014
Photo © John Pearson
![Halsey Rodman](https://www.architecturalrecord.com/ext/resources/archives/features/2014/images/08/1408-Something-Borrowed-Halsey-Rodman-6.jpg?t=1456503599&width=1080)
Joshua Tree, California
Gradually/We Became Aware/Of a Hum in the Room, 2014
Photo © John Pearson