Community When We Need It Most: Eileen Roth’s Spirit Houses, at UH Wiesenberger Gallery

When entire cities go up in flames, when institutions betray the public’s trust, when senseless acts of violence result in the deaths of Innocents time and time again, we search for stability, for community, for a place or a space that feels safe. Eileen Roth’s Spirit Houses provide the antidote we need in these terrible times of trouble. Now on view at University Hospital’s Trudy Wiesenberger Gallery, Roth’s most ambitious project of her six-decades-long career offers viewers a space where we can all feel safe, known, and seen.

The journey to create the Spirit Houses has been a lifelong pursuit for Roth. As a medium, a painter, and deeply spiritual person, Roth has been creating her spirit houses—unique architectural forms that respond to an individual’s aura or personality—for friends and family for decades. But in October 2000, as she tells the story, “I was at a Bette Midler concert, celebrating my sister-in-law’s sixtieth birthday (during a hurricane). As I sat there, listening and watching her amazing talent and personality, I wondered how I could ever create a Spirit House for someone I don’t know…Across my vision danced the astrological glyphs and it occurred to me to use these as my muse for the houses.” For Roth, these signs give visual form to the ineffable collective desires to both transcend the physical world and to feel safe and known and seen. To be home. In her search for unique architectural forms that represent the individual identity of each astrological sign, Roth has created a neighborhood, as it were, in which the community of humanity can live and work together in peace and in unity. There is space and place for everyone. There is a community for every body and every person.

Whether you subscribe to the astrological belief system or not, Roth’s Spirit Houses give every viewer the place and space to contemplate community. How do we fit together as individuals within the larger whole? How can we create safer spaces for each individual to be and express who they are? The astrological signs are one way of thinking about parts of a whole.
These paintings started as small studies and eventually morphed into life-sized canvases. Who knows? Perhaps one day we will be able to experience the safety and beauty of this community in the third dimension!

Eileen Roth’s Spirit Houses are on view through March 31 in the Trudy Weisenberger Gallery, UH Cleveland Medical Center, 11100 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland. The gallery is located on the first floor of the Humphrey Building adjacent to the Lerner Tower main entrance. Parking is available in the Seidman Cancer Center parking garage along UH Drive.

TRUDY WEISENBERGER GALLERY
UH Cleveland Medical Center
11100 Euclid Avenue
Cleveland, Ohio 44106

EVENTS:
Eileen Roth: Spirit Houses, through March 31