Knowing he’d be having a show in Flatfile’s basement space, Jason Peot began monthly visits there more than a year ago. “I would wander around, look at blueprints, stare at the walls,” he says. “I really tried to get the site inside my head.” All his recent exhibits have included a site-specific installation that required regular visits beforehand, as he looks for something to bring out that’s “either invisible or taken for granted.” For a show at Northern Illinois University six years ago, he saw from an alley next to the building that the gallery had bricked-over windows he could cut through. At Flatfile he realized that the wall dividing the two basement rooms was “probably pretty light duty, so maybe I could go through it and not have too big a mess on my hands restoring it.” Peering into a little space above a duct, he discovered a 14-inch-thick vertical structural beam inside the wall. “That was like winning the lottery,” he says. It took four long days to construct Intersect (Sublucent)–cutting a rectangular hole to expose the beam, removing studs, building a frame of slats around the opening, and installing lightbulbs behind the slats. “People experience spaces in a pretty blind way. I like creating a new experience within a space they’ve been in before. Buildings like Flatfile’s are fortresses–you don’t see anything like it built today.”
