Astrid Burns | Special Issues Editor

Most art galleries present art in spaces that feel perfect, untouched, and far removed from the way people live. “Maintenance Request,” the one-night exhibition curated by seniors Maya Iskoz and Max Schreiber, celebrated the opposite. 

Hosted on Nov. 7, 2025 and designed by Fiona Lyons-Carlson, who graduated from WashU in 2025, in a student apartment, the show became one of the most surprising art moments of the semester. 

“Things are always breaking,” Schreiber said. “It’s your classic student apartment: over a hundred years old and held together by a collection of quick, half-done repairs.”

That lived-in chaos shaped everything. The exhibition featured works by graduate students Payton Landes, Levi Walker, Zach Johnson, Shiyao Fu, senior Robin Pyo, and the curators themselves. The pieces used materials such as metal, wax, brick, paper, and found wood, while the video installation room continued that handmade aesthetic with cinder blocks and scavenged scraps. Viewers moved through the rooms naturally, drifting between sculptures, prints, and glowing screens.

“The video room is reflective of the DIY nature of an apartment show,” Iskoz said.

If the format sounds informal, the intention behind it was anything but. Both curators spoke about how little of the artistic process the community ever gets to see. 

“People don’t realize how much work is being done,” Schreiber said. “A single sculpture may be the 30th iteration of something. Making is slow, and it’s mostly invisible.”

The apartment made that invisible labor strangely visible. Placing art in a place where students cook, cry, stretch canvases, host friends, and submit assignments blurred the boundary between work and life. For Iskoz, the blur is the point.

“I don’t really differentiate between my free time and my work time … it’s a lifestyle. You’re thinking about it all the time.” 

She added that the behind-the-scenes work of making art demands far more time and energy than people realize.

 “Half of making art is thinking, and thinking is hard. It takes a lot of invisible labor. It’s easy to make thoughtless art.”

“Maintenance Request” was rooted in conversations between artists, friends, and other visitors wandering through a crowded apartment on a Friday night. Many of the works on view were not simply objects but traces of ongoing thought. Schreiber spoke about how his ideas often come out of classes, through discussions on politics, religion, and identity.

“I think art is a really great way to communicate a thought or idea. I make work about the questions I’m asking myself,” he said. Iskoz agreed, saying that her inspirations often come from beyond art, such as literature and philosophy. She said thinking through these ideas is a part of the practice itself. 

Part of the curators’ mission was openness, and the name “Plus 1” hints at hospitality. 

“People usually come to an apartment as a ‘plus one’ for a party, whereas this time, the plus one was for an art opening,” Iskoz said. 

They taped ordinary printer-paper signs to the building, making the show feel less like a polished event and more like something anchored in the neighborhood, almost like a flyer to be stumbled upon at a coffee shop or telephone pole. It was designed to invite.

The exhibition felt communal in a way formal galleries rarely manage. The sunroom transformed into a glowing video space with windows framing screens lit with red-heavy palettes. 

“At night, the room basically became a darkroom,” Schreiber said.

The effect made the apartment suddenly visible as an art space from the street, hinting at something happening just beyond the threshold. 

Inside the sunroom, the viewing experience was slow and deliberate. Only one person could listen to each video at a time using a single pair of headphones, giving every viewer a private encounter in a crowded environment. It created an experience that felt both public and personal.

Astrid Burns | Special Issues Editor

Even with its casual setup, the work itself was heavy with personal meaning. Schreiber said that for him, art becomes a space to investigate difficult questions that do not have easy answers. That sense of art as a form of inquiry shaped much of the show’s tone.

Iskoz’s work similarly stems from big questions. Her sculptures and video work, often polished in appearance but deeply conceptual beneath the surface, felt at home in the makeshift gallery: thoughtful and rooted in everyday rhythms of her life. Together, they hope shops like this will not remain novelties on campus. 

“Taking inspiration from courses outside of art, my recent pieces attempt to bridge mathematical and religious or philosophical understandings of why the universe exists and why we’re here,” she said. 

Instead of masking them, “Maintenance Request” highlighted the imperfections of student living. Instead of treating art as something separate from daily life, it folded it directly into a place where life happens. Instead of keeping creative work behind the walls of studios, it invited friends, community members, and professors to witness creations by WashU artists. 

“I haven’t seen people doing DIY apartment shows here since I was a freshman. I’m hoping younger students see this and think, ‘Oh, I can do this too,’” Iskoz said. 

In a campus full of polished buildings and official galleries, an aging apartment made art feel human, accessible, relatable, and lived-in. It suggested that creativity doesn’t need pristine conditions to matter. Sometimes, all it needs is a place where someone is willing to clear the furniture, borrow some cinder blocks, print a song on 8.5×11 paper, and open the door.