Second Bedroom is exactly what you think it is: a tiny spare bedroom in the back of a fourth-floor apartment building at 3216 S. Morgan St. in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood. But it’s the installation-art “gallery” inside the spare room that makes the trek up four flights of stairs (and, if you’re like me, a detour through a neighbor’s apartment) totally worth it.
Few people would think to transform a section of their apartments into an interactive art space, but for Chris Smith, it was a pretty intuitive decision. “It just seemed like it made a lot of sense to get something like that started, because it would just integrate me further into my kind of community of artists,” Smith says. “It was really just realizing that I had the resources to do it.”
From a curatorial perspective, Smith is open to a variety of concepts but usually features emerging artists whose work often includes interactive elements that enhance the 7′ x 12′ space. “I think just given the whole experience of getting here, it just kind of has to be a little more aware of itself,” Smith says. “Maybe it’s still kind of the white box, but it just has to push it a little further than just presenting paintings of someone’s studio work in there.”
On this Saturday, May 15, Second Bedroom will host an opening for its latest show, Death of a Death of a Salesman by Vincent Dermody, and even Smith doesn’t know exactly what to expect.
“I’m not sure what direction it’s going to take, but he worked for a long time selling advertising space for a magazine,” Smith says. “He was really in this seedy kind of cut-throat salesman job that he worked for a really long time that sounds, according to him, like he was working with some of the most despicable people, in a really nasty field. So he’s going to base his project on his experience of working there.”
For artists who like to show their work in even smaller confines, Smith also runs Medicine Cabinet — which is located in his bathroom. “I don’t use my medicine cabinet, so it would be kind of fun and small and easy to organize,” he says. “I think it’s also just a lot of fun to play on the tension for people who come here, to my apartment, which is a very private space, and offering that up is interesting because there is a tendency anyway for people to want to look in there.”
Although Smith initially chose an apartment in Bridgeport while he was working on a bachelor’s degree in studio art from the University of Illinois at Chicago (because it was in close proximity to school), he decided to stay because of the neighborhood’s low-key atmosphere and tight-knit art community. The affordable rents didn’t hurt either.
“I’m really fortunate to do this because my rent is so cheap that I haven’t had to get a roommate,” he says. “So I have an extra room that I could turn into a little art-project space.”
– Katie Fanuko