High fences, hidden cameras, and a pervasive sense of being watched – this is not a prison I’m describing. The same characteristics increasingly apply to any American city’s bougiest neighborhood.
Austin’s own Tarrytown, for instance – once a 365-acre estate called Woodlawn, inhabited by the designer of the Texas Governor’s Mansion, then home to actual former Texas governor Elisha M. Pease – is currently depicted through multidisciplinary artist Ben Siekierski’s eyes in his solo show at McLennon Pen Co. Gallery, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor.”
Siekierski came to Austin by way of Philadelphia and settled in what he calls the Tarrytown Traphouse, “because there’s just random shit all in the lawn and it’s visibly falling apart,” he tells the Chronicle. “Moving here, I think I’ve been the most broke I’ve ever been in my life. I’ve always had, like, three jobs I’m juggling. So it’s this contrast between being super broke and living in a super ritzy area.”
That divide is emphasized in Siekierski’s use of the gallery space – he has literally bisected the main room with a chain-link Rent-A-Fence, complete with neighborhood watch signs. The paintings can’t be accessed unless you snake through the gallery’s other rooms, McLennon’s unique, low-ceilinged house lending itself to the subject matter. It would be hard to feel like an intruder in a traditional white cube.
When Siekierski walks to the Exposition H-E-B, he feels the lack of a well-worn public transit system in Austin; the naked feeling one gets when occupying technically public space here is in direct contrast to cities like New York or Philadelphia, where the masses mingle daily. It’s not that Austin is richer than its East Coast counterparts, but “I kinda wasn’t expecting the culture shock of how clearly defined and enforced the class boundaries are within the city,” Siekierski says.
“It’s not like I’m a stranger to being around extreme wealth,” he adds, noting his time working as a substitute art teacher at a private school in Philadelphia. “[But] everyone wants that Philly edge, even if you’re a shithead from Delco or a trust fund baby from the Main Line. It’s kinda the same thing in New York – you may live in a rail house apartment with six roommates, but you still get on the same overcrowded subway with the people who own condos on Billionaire’s Row.”
In Austin, maybe due to its relatively new status as a big city and the influx of tech millionaires, the artist shares: “I look at all these houses, and the newer houses all have these crazy fences around them, and the older houses have these decaying chain-link fences – you can see there was a point where people started moving into the neighborhood, and others kind of fortified themselves off from the rest of the neighborhood … Every new house is behind several layers of walls and every old house looks like it’s falling apart.”
Despite this contrast, what unites the old and new is this anxious isolationism – even of the dilapidated farmhouses, Siekierski says, “it’s still a multimillion-dollar house.” He draws a connection between the influx of the upper class in Austin and their ensuing fortresses: “they’re waiting for the end of the world.”
Pencil drawings of snakes tied in knots slither through the same neighborhood, but perhaps another area – they’re more serious, more emotional, gesturing toward more interior concerns. Aside from these, through the dark nightscape Siekierski’s sensibility is majority wry – upon the show’s opening, Siekierski and Jill McLennon, the gallery owner, collected a large pile of Bird scooters outside on the patio and pumped recordings of actual bird song out of it. (The company later reached out to say they weren’t happy with how the installation reflected them. It has since been taken down.) A taxidermied pigeon wielding a Swiss Army knife perches on the chain link fence in the main gallery space. “He’s a little bit of added security,” Siekierski chuckles.
More than a jokey addition, Siekierski reminds us that pigeons were domesticated, then abandoned. “Every pigeon makes me so sad. It’s like if we just all decided we didn’t need dogs anymore, and just threw them out on the street,” he says. Maybe similarly, the artist feels a lack of permanent belonging to Tarrytown. “I live in the neighborhood, but I still feel that kind of otherness from it,” he says. “It’s all these people who live here forever, and I’m just a guy renting a room.”
“Won’t You Be My Neighbor” runs through Jan. 11 at McLennon Pen Co. Gallery.
This article appears in January 3 • 2025.