Mary Ellen Carroll's Retrospective at CAMH Explores the Invisible Apparatuses of Architecture

Key facts

• Exhibition: 'How to Talk Dirty and Influence People' at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH), through November 1.
• Retrospective of Mary Ellen Carroll, curated with CAMH curator Rebecca Matalon.
• Prototype 180 (1999–ongoing) involves a suburban house in Sharpstown, Houston, rotated, recladded, broadcasted, and demolished.
• Federal (2003) features two static 24-hour film views of Charles Luckman's Federal Building in Los Angeles.
• Act of God (1994) references flooding of Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth House.
• The Stone is More Stone Than Before (1999) critiques Mies historiography with a bibliography of public housing works.
• Exhibition uses scaffolding to minimize waste and align with Gunnar Birkerts's roof trusses.
• Carroll's work challenges conventional notions of completion and representation.
• Carroll contributed to the 2012 Busan Biennial with a project engaging South Korea's jeonse system.
• Works include The Doppelganger Tapes (1993–ongoing) and a polar bear suit used to scale a Memphis smokestack.