The “conversation pit,” a sunken lounge that flourished in Mid-century architectural design, is based on a very compelling arrangement—one as old as the Pueblo kiva and Roman Senate. With its recessed floor and surrounding platforms, Roman Susan echoes this same configuration, urging a show about social exchange and the complex rules of intimate gatherings. The pit or “pool” provides an unusually close and cooperative setting for discourse, but with that intimacy comes implied restrictions.

No Diving! offers the installation as a public gathering space: throughout June and July, the lounge-ified interior of Roman Susan will host a series of workshops, screenings, discussions—not to mention a margarita party—, a test of the uneasy balance between permission and restriction in art.

With its lulling rhythm of wave patterns, its glossy comforts and hypnotic colors, the show entices the viewer to join in, to relax in and on the installation. And once the institutional formality of the gallery evaporates, when the experience becomes more like hanging out on a friend’s patio, a certain quality of the art itself may come in to focus. Call it a veneer, a protective cover, like the trappings of a stylish but over-clean, over-protected home.

Against this backdrop, that of the shimmering barrier with which art preserves its own rarefied status, a rotation of artists will entertain, teach, and mingle with visitors, unsettling the restrictive atmosphere both of the art-object and of the social setting. The limits they encounter will reveal a contradiction inherent to public spaces as well as to artworks: that in order to be enjoyable, they must also be prohibitive. The programming in the coming weeks offers a chance to experiment within the parameters of that compromise.

Artist interventions and programming featured (in order): Colleen Plumb, Meg Duguid, Lindsey Dorr-Niro, Savannah Reich, Hideous Beast, Richard Medina, Ruby T, Melissa Oresky and Zak Boerger, Adam Farcus, Cole Lu, Kathleen Scott, Sage Dawson, Erin Hayden, Mike Rea