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Dion called the installation Mrs. Christopher’s House based on the name of the former owner. On the ground floor, he has constructed a glass-walled diorama of what he imagines the house looked like on Christmas Eve in 1961 – the year he was born. Like many of his former projects, the work recalls museum period rooms that seek to create an immersive experience of a specific time and place. Dion describes the room – which features, among other items, a framed picture of former US President John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie, an aluminum Christmas tree, and toys scattered across the floor – as representing the house at its ‘apex,’ reflecting ‘a moment of optimism in the trajectory of the American working class’ and Pittsburgh’s midcentury prosperity. The aluminum Christmas tree, for example, gestures to the metal manufacturing company Alcoa, which is headquartered in the city. In the 1970s and 1980s, the steel industry that served as the cornerstone of Pittsburgh’s local economy collapsed, causing severe financial consequences which have reverberated for decades. This installation encapsulates a time of hope and innocence, before the social and environmental costs of this industry became widely known. The room also nods to the strategies Dion employed for Christmas Eve, 1933, a 2016 commission for SiTE:LAB in Grand Rapids, Michigan. For that project, he transformed a rectory of the parish church of St. Joseph the Worker (a building about to be demolished). He recalls that melancholic space as ‘a depiction of a lonely priest’s Christmas Eve on the verge of the world tearing itself apart, on the verge of the Second World War.’
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