Going down?

Since April of 2004, one of the most imaginative art spaces in the city has been an abandoned elevator carriage in the Fine Arts Building. SubCity Projects, curated by Candida Alvarez, has hosted seven exhibitions, and the current one, up through May 29, will be the last. The new owners of the 19th-century architectural gem are concerned about liability.

Alvarez, a painting professor at the School of the Art Institute, has had a studio in the building for years and wanted to bring exhibitions there. "I wanted to share this beautiful building. I love the whole idea of the underground," she says, referring to some of the more innovative spaces that have existed in Chicago, such as Modest Projects, which was "a shelf in someone's house." Alvarez didn't have the time to sit in a space or keep regular hours, so she initially thought of using one of the many display cases available on most floors near the ornate elevators. One of the Fine Arts Building's many charms is the original 1898 lifts that require an operator to work the cage elevators. To get down from the upper floors, you stand in the corridor in front of the bank of elevators and flag the operator going up or down to hitch a ride.

Alvarez mentioned the idea to the building's former owner, Tom Graham, and ended up with something very above ground. "One day, Tom stopped by and said, 'How about this elevator?'" Alvarez recalls. "As long as anyone can remember—some guess 50 years—the elevator has been suspended on the eighth floor." Over time, the stuck carriage became a storage unit; when Graham showed it to Alvarez, it was filled with filing cabinets. The carriage has been cannibalized for parts to fix the other three working carriages over the years. "[Graham] offered to fix it up and paint it and I said, 'No, no don't paint it; just clean it out,'" Alvarez says. An electric outlet was installed, and SubCity Projects was born.

For Alvarez, this suspended, trapped space held incredible potential. "I wondered what artists could do with that," she says. The first artist tapped was Steve Cordero. "He did this amazing piece where he projected a video of the stairwell in his grandmother's apartment building in Humboldt Park." In Revisited, Lifted, Elevated, Cordero used a mirror to fill the entire carriage with images. There was also a recording of people going up and down the stairs, enhanced by the natural sounds of the building—elevator noises, echoes of footsteps by the grand stairwell and the many musicians on the floor (from a neighboring drum shop to a voice coach down the hall).

The elevator carriage has been hanging out on the eighth floor for decades, and while it's hard to imagine anything dangerous happening, Alvarez says she no longer feels the new owner's decision to terminate the exhibition space is completely ridiculous. She has been reading Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist recently and had to put the book down, she says, at least until this last installation is removed. "It's all about an elevator crashing," she says.

SubCity Projects was never easy to find. "You just have to trip into it," she says. "I like that it's ordinary. It's just ordinary."

It is and it isn't.

The elevator's final exhibition is Kim Mitseff and Amy Vogel's "Over-the-Top Love." It is, Alvarez says, "all about love and chocolate candy and sex." White-chocolate roses hang in boughs above a strange landscape made of spun sugar and clay figures. It's hard to make out what everything is in the muted lighting—or where the love is, except in the creation of the art itself. Mitseff vowed to provide a platter of chocolate truffles every day, and true to her word, there is a tray on a small table nearby with a sign that reads: try me.

"I love all the senses that [chocolate] addresses," Mitseff says, referring to the substance that we can smell and taste, and the feelings it evokes. Vogel added figures—clay monkeys and girls. "We played together on my landscape," Mitseff says.

While it's possible the elevator could be taken down to the ground floor, Alvarez is not sure what's next: "SubCity Projects is a concept I am going to put in my back pocket and see where it ends up."

SubCity Project's "Over-the-Top Love," at the Fine Arts Building's eighth-floor elevator lobby (410 S Michigan Ave, between Van Buren St and Congress Dr) can be seen through May 29 (Mon–Sat noon–6pm; Sun noon–3pm).