coat room
October 25, 2025
In Coat Room, Gfell transforms one of SHED’s least-seen spaces—a small back room and former surgery room of the 1857 landmark house—into an uncanny site of repair, reflection, and haunting presence. Using a graphite-and-plaster mixture polished to a dark, mirror-like sheen, Gfell patches sections of the walls to create a surface that hovers between repair and apparition. The installation takes on the qualities of a “scrying mirror,” referencing occult practices, portals, and supernatural thresholds while remaining deeply tethered to the architecture and folklore of the house itself.
Eli Gfell speaks with the house through the languages of wood, carpentry, philosophy, and time. Their ongoing dialogue—of preservation, demolition, repair, extraction, transplantation, reconstruction, mutation, and presentation—is quiet, hidden in plain sight: embedded in the walls, baseboards, stairs, furniture, and floor planks. Their voices inflect one another through imbuement, call, response, and echo. The rooms retain the memory and record of their conversation.
— Jon Gott
