Mobile home parks exist at the very lowest rungs of the American affordable housing hierarchy and are relegated to the outskirts of urban spaces. Built-in, an on-going installation project architected by artist Amy Ritter, provides a visual voice to these marginalized, and often stigmatized, communities. Born in an Eastern Pennsylvania mobile home, and now based in Brooklyn, NY, Ritter is motivated by her origins, and creates to educate, embrace, and bring transparency to a community often overlooked. Ritter adopts the lens of an artist, yet she equally performs, in Built-in, as an archivist, folklorist, urban sociologist, and activist. She illuminates, excavates, and embolsters these often neglected and unnoticed housing ecosystems by re-colonizing these spaces through two-dimensional installations. By doing so, Ritter strives to mitigate the shame and stigma surrounding them. Ritter does not view them as invisible, nor as physical or economical pock marks on the landscape, rather Ritter works to unearth the beauty found on the outskirts, and behind the proverbial, and literal, bushes of these mobile home parks.
Ritter works primarily in the Northeast, where, like the rest of America, these neighborhoods are strategically placed on the peripheral of thriving urban communities, and are intentionally shrouded, and partitioned, by fences, walls, and shrubbery. This further distances them from the mainstream public’s gaze. Although the majority of mobile home parks are concentrated in Texas and Florida, Ritter focuses primarily on the Northeast, working with communities in MA, NY, CT, VT, RI, PA, and ME. Ritter is aware that the socio-spatial stigma surrounding mobile home parks continues to grow as insecurities of homeowners rise as their land beneath their homes is auctioned off. She wants to bring agency, autonomy, and justice to these homeowners through art. Built-in is an investigation of these spaces and although it is linked to Ritter’s own genesis, it resounds further than just her own personal narrative. It is a commentary on present day class warfare, increasing wealth disparity, and affordable housing, in America today.
Built-in offers a rare, and intimate, view of this very American style of affordable housing and their landscapes, reflected through photographic windows, street maps, and sculpture. Placed in site-specific spaces, they recreate a memory-scape that viewer is invited to enter, even though, as two-dimensional objects, they continue to resist contact and remain inaccessible to visitors. This concept, while gestating long before it was realized, was first performed in Johnson, VT, in 2015, when Ritter was an Artist-In-Residence at the Vermont Studio Center. Built-in is processed based, amorphous, and a metaphor for Ritter’s own shifting, and evolving, relationship to these spaces, as well as the relationship with her own queer identity, an identity also often marginalized. When interacting with these communities, Ritter’s body acts like a division.
Ritter’s body personifies the building material that creates a structure to connect to class, gender, and home. Ritter believes the body contains a history that follows her, and us, around. It is invisible but always present. Using Xerox prints, plywood, wood paneling, and cinder-blocks—materials that relate back to the makeshift homes of her past—Ritter is able to accurately represent, and synthesize, the environment she came from while navigating the place she inhabits now, particularly as an artist in a contemporary economic landscape which can, itself, be closed off, and accessible only to some. Ritter’s research is extensive and well-informed, and Manufactured Insecurity: Mobile Home Parks and Americans’ Tenuous Right to Place, by EstherSullivan, became a guiding theoretical cultural compass for the artist. Sullivan’s book draws on ethnographic data, while examining the legal, economic, social, and geospatial forces that all intersect.
-Siobhan Bledsoe