House of Plato, House of More, House of Marx is an installation in which 12 mice are put in a plexi box with 3 books propped with their spines upwards, suggestive of an A-frame house. The books themselves--Plato's The Republic (~360 B.C.E.), Sir Thomas More's Utopia (1515), and Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto (1848)--are all foundational texts of Western political philosophy who posit reason as the means by which state and humans can productively and morally exist. The mice are invited to (literally) inhabit these texts and discover which offers the most comfort and use for their own utopia-building.

Over the course of the installation, the mice showed preference for Utopia (perhaps the 'softness' of the text proved most amenable). By shredding the book from the inside out, they curiously carved out their own secret space: when the book was inverted we discovered what looked like an inverse topo map carved from the layers of text, a palimpsest constructed from physical needs.

“. . . excrement represents bodies and matter that are mostly comic; it is the most suitable substance for the degrading of all that is exalted. . .In the image of tripe life and death, birth, excrement, and food are all drawn together and tied in one grotesque knot; this is the center of bodily topography in which the upper and lower stratum penetrate each other. . .“The body that figures in all the expressions of the unofficial speech of the people is the body that fecundates and is fecundated, that gives birth and is born, devours and is devoured, drinks, defecates, is sick and dying.” --Mikhail Bakhtin, Carnival Ambivalenc (1965)