Mona Gazala
Cloud House is a vacant home next door to me in Columbus. In 2016, with the owners having been absentee for over a decade, I secured approval from the neighbors to transform it into a painted sculpture with clouds billowing across its boarded-up windows, engaging and delighting the neighbors passing by. During the process of gentrification in the neighborhood, my relationship with the house changed. New owners bought it, gutted it, and then left me to protect its unsecured interior as they in turn became absentee owners. Successive buyers painted over the cloud motif. In the aftermath, Cloud House was memorialized with a yard sign documenting its colorful past, and a vinyl banner on my house, facing Cloud House and poetically marking its demise as an object of joy.