Before the opening of Professor Alli Lemon’s solo exhibition “Finch on a Powerline” at Blankspace on November 14, students from Professor Britt Ransom’s “Personal Narratives in Practice and Place” got an early look at how a space by artists, for artists, shapes site-specific work.
Inside Blankspace
Originally built in 1900 as a single-family home in Wilkinsburg, PA, Blankspace now hosts a print studio on the first floor and an experimental project space upstairs stewarded by artist Joey Behrens. The building’s ongoing renovations mirror the nature of artistic process itself, as each new installation responds to the evolving state of the architecture and the conditions of the current moment. That ethos created an ideal context for Ransom’s class, which asks students to dig into personal lineage, lived experience, and site-specific relationships.
Blankspace also has a rich history of CMU-affiliated artists showing work: Recent exhibitions include “Homebody” by Visiting Professor Racheal Starbuck, Sculpture Technician Micheal Muelhaupt, and CFA Photography instructor Bryan Martello; “Condition Report” by Erin Mallea (MFA ’19); “Shelf Life” by Professor Sarah Tancred and alum Jennifer Shin (BFA ’24); and “CATLAND” by alum Laurence Gao (BSA ’24) and Lydia Rosenberg, Curator of Art & Research Scholar at CMU’s Hunt Institute.
A Guided Preview of “Finch on a Powerline”
In her solo exhibition, Professor Alli Lemon layered drawing, projection, and installation to explore what it feels like to arrive somewhere new and slowly find footing. The works combine transparent images of textures, streetscapes, and fleeting observations into compositions that are both abstract and recognizable, creating a tension between clarity and obscurity. Lemon’s title poem, centered on the metaphor of a lone finch perched above the landscape, gave students a framework for thinking about displacement, belonging, and the small moments of understanding that emerge over time. For a class focused on personal narrative, the exhibition modeled how vulnerability and formal experimentation can coexist in powerful ways.
The Miniature World of Almost Gallery
A miniature exhibition space of its own, Lemon’s Almost Gallery is housed inside a found dollhouse. The three floors, attic, and sixteen windows allow artists to create carefully staged, layered environments. For its debut show, “Spend the Night,” Lemon invited new work by Professor Ransom, Andrew W. Allison, and Mathias Rushin. Each artist used scale, humor, and material detail to compress complex ideas about memory, identity, and daily life into small, intimate forms. Ransom’s work, installed on the top floor, reflected the themes of her class: how narrative can unfold through objects, space, and gesture, and how constraint can become a tool for experimentation rather than a limitation.
Photos by Jorge Santiago and Chris Uhren