The Reserved Ground, With Cones and Snow

Exhibition. 5 works on view at ///digs.zeal.items, 4652 STRAHLE ST, Holmesburg. 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.

Five works at a single point in the city, the first acquired in February 2025 and the most recent in February 2026; three of them have since been accessioned into the permanent collection. Two commissioners: Police Department and Streets Department. The museum did not solicit any of them.

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

1. The Reserved Ground, With Cones and Snow, No. 1 — Box truck, deflated rear tire, timber shim, aerosol intervention. Accession 17416160. Acquired February 10, 2025. 584 days on view. The composition rests on a stacked wooden shim set beneath the collapsed rear tire, a small structural gesture that has assumed the load the wheel no longer carries. Low sun rakes the truck's white flank, raising the rivet lines and the seams of the box body, while a green aerosol tag has been laid across the black lettering in a looping hand. As the first work exhibited from this ground, it establishes the terms the rest of the series elaborates: a vehicle held level by timber, the asphalt beneath it broken into fragments by the weight. The museum preserves it as the anchoring form of the group.
2. The Reserved Ground, With Cones and Snow, No. 2 — Automotive, stationary, oxidising trim, fog. Accession 17602723. Acquired May 16, 2025. 489 days on view. Fog flattens the background to a white field, leaving the silver body as the only sustained tonal passage in the composition; the paint has gone chalky along the doors and lower panels, reading closer to grey than to metal. Two broad painted lines cross the asphalt at the lower edge of the frame, and the work sits just clear of them, parallel to the curb in a posture of exact and undisturbed alignment. Seen against its siblings in this series, the piece is notable for what does not attend it: no traffic cone, no snow, no seasonal marker of any kind, only the humid white air and the hydrant standing yellow at the far right. The museum preserves this state as the series' most unencumbered view of the ground itself.
3. The Reserved Ground, With Cones and Snow, No. 3 — Asphalt and concrete substrate, subsurface void, aggregate and volunteer grasses. Accession 18011652. Acquired August 26, 2025. 387 days on view. The opening is bounded on three sides by a torn lip of concrete and on the fourth by a rusted steel beam, whose oxidised underside sits directly above the void and frames it like a lintel. Light does not reach the floor of the cavity; only a wet black gleam and a single lodged fragment register at depth, while hairline cracks run outward through the slab to the right. Where earlier works in this series document the ground under cover and under snow, this one is made in full daylight with the surface fully open, and the museum preserves it as the series' most candid section through what the other works conceal.
4. The Reserved Ground, With Cones and Snow, No. 4 — Box truck, oxidising steel wheels, aerosol accretion, volunteer vegetation. Accession 18804124. Acquired November 11, 2025. 310 days on view. The work's box panel carries two competing systems of mark-making: the commissioned lettering beneath, rendered in yellow and grey, and the aerosol tags applied across it in black and green, one of which sits directly over the painted figure's shoulder. Grass has established itself at the rear wheel, growing through the asphalt seam in a clump tall enough to cast its own shadow, which fixes the vehicle's position more convincingly than any wheel does. Read against its siblings in the series, this is the work in which the ground begins to claim the object rather than merely surround it. The museum preserves it for that transfer.
5. The Reserved Ground, With Cones and Snow, No. 5 — Automotive, stationary, traffic cones, compacted snow. Accession 19536702. Acquired February 12, 2026. 217 days on view. The composition resolves around the boundary between two claims on the same ground: the snow bank with its ring of cones and slack tape, and the tan vehicle immediately behind it, its paint flecked white with road salt and its front wheel cut hard toward the curb. The cones lean at slightly different angles, and the tape between them has gone loose enough to rest on the snow rather than span it. Read against the other works from this site, the piece is distinguished by this added apparatus of enclosure, which marks the ground as held rather than merely occupied. The museum preserves it as the series' clearest instance of a still life that has been fenced.

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