The Long Berth

Exhibition. 7 works on view at ///packet.surely.songs, 155 E WASHINGTON LN, Mount Airy, East. The wall is circular: walking in either direction returns to the title wall. Use Tab to move between works and Enter to read a work’s wall label. Arrow keys move along the wall.

Seven works at a single point in the city, the first acquired in May 2025 and the most recent in June 2025; all of them have since been accessioned into the permanent collection. One commissioner: Police Department. The museum did not solicit any of them.

The works are exhibited in order of acquisition. Visitors will notice that the subject does not change; the museum invites them to consider what does.

1. The Long Berth, No. 2 — Passenger van, stationary, oxidising rocker panels, nocturnal installation. Accession 17619810. Acquired May 27, 2025. 479 days on view. The van's white flank takes the porch light directly, so that the body reads as the brightest plane in the composition while the sky behind it has gone to deep blue. Rust has worked upward from the rocker panel and behind the rear wheel arch, and the chrome trim strip has begun to lift away from the sheet metal it once finished. A second white body enters at the left edge, establishing the alignment that governs the series; the museum preserves this work as the clearest statement of that alignment under artificial light.
2. The Long Berth, No. 3 — Automotive, oxidising steel, porch light, nocturnal installation. Accession 17625028. Acquired May 28, 2025. 477 days on view. The porch light behind the work does most of the illuminating, throwing a warm pool across the stone facade while the van's long white flank holds a flatter, cooler grey. Rust has advanced steadily along the rocker panel and around the rear wheel arch, and the steel wheels sit bare, their hubcaps long since parted from them. Read against the earlier works in this series, the body has lost more of its brightness and the lean of the front tire has settled further into the asphalt. The museum preserves the piece for the way a single domestic lamp renders an object of this scale as an interior still life.
3. The Long Berth, No. 5 — Passenger vans, white, stationary in sequence, full sun. Accession 17629956. Acquired May 30, 2025. 475 days on view. The composition resolves around repetition: two white van bodies of nearly identical mass set end to end, their chrome rear bumpers catching the same hard overhead light. The nearest work presses close enough to the curb that grass has come up around its rear tire and the tire ahead of it sits at a slight outward cant, the kind of settled posture that arrives only through stillness. Read against its siblings in the series, this entry is the most fully lit, the sun flattening the white panels until the vehicle reads as a single blank plane against the stone facades behind. The museum preserves it for that flatness, which renders a large object almost weightless.
4. The Long Berth, No. 7 — Automotive, oxidising steel, porch light, dusk exposure. Accession 17631069. Acquired June 2, 2025. 473 days on view. The porch light falls across the van's flank at a low angle, raising the shallow dents along the sliding door and leaving the windows entirely black. Rust has spread upward from the rear wheel arch into the quarter panel, and the wheels have been reduced to unpainted steel, their hubcaps long gone. Seen against a sky still holding its last blue, the body reads less as a vehicle than as a pale architectural volume matched in length to the house behind it. Among the works assembled here, this is the one in which the museum finds the form most fully settled into its setting.
5. The Long Berth, No. 9 — Automotive, extended wheelbase, oxidising rocker panel, nocturnal exposure. Accession 17636624. Acquired June 4, 2025. 471 days on view. The van's white flank runs nearly the full width of the frame, broken only by the dark band of its side glass and by the mud-and-rust wash accumulating along the rocker panel below. A single porch lamp behind it throws the only warm light in the composition, catching the stone facing of the house while the vehicle itself reads as a pale mass against the blue of late dusk. Later works in this series show the same berth occupied at other hours; here the low light flattens the body into a plane and brings the bare steel wheels forward. The museum values this entry for the clarity with which artificial light and residual daylight divide the work between two registers.
6. The Long Berth, No. 10 — Passenger van, extended wheelbase, unpainted steel wheels, nocturnal installation. Accession 17639382. Acquired June 5, 2025. 469 days on view. The van's white flank runs nearly the full width of the composition, long enough that the rowhouse behind it is reduced to fragments of stone and lit porch. Rust has worked upward from the rocker panel into the lower doors, and the bare steel wheels — stripped of their covers — give the work a squat, settled stance against the asphalt. In this entry the sky retains its late blue, and the porch lamp behind the cab reads as the only warm light in the frame; the museum notes how the body's flat white takes that light without reflecting it. Among the works gathered here, this is the one in which the vehicle most fully displaces its own setting.
7. The Long Berth, No. 11 — Automotive, white enamel, oxidising rocker panels, nocturnal exposure. Accession 17641656. Acquired June 5, 2025. 469 days on view. The van is read broadside, its full length filling the frame from bumper to bumper, so that the eye travels the sequence of windows the way it would a frieze. Rust has worked upward from the rocker panel and gathered in a pale bloom behind the rear wheel, and the wheels themselves, stripped of covers, sit as bare discs against the dark asphalt. The single porch lamp behind provides the only warm light in the composition, and it falls on the house rather than on the work, leaving the white body to register in cooler, flatter tones. Within this series the museum regards the present view as the one in which the vehicle's proportions are most fully stated.

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