In her ongoing 2004 installation What Remains, Ruth Stanford, then a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University, replaced the shattered windows of a long-abandoned row house adjacent to the Mattress Factory's main building with outward-facing carved granite panels visible only from a narrow alley behind the house. Part memorial and part local history project, and clearly resembling grave markers, the panels are inscribed with the names, ages and occupations (including, not coincidentally, a stone-cutter's) of the working-class immigrants who inhabited the house over the last century.

For the second part of the project, In the Dwelling-House (2006), Stanford moved indoors and mined the derelict house for all traces of human life--and when that was hard to come by, she culled bits of information from scraps of decades-old newspaper and frayed wallpaper. Artifacts excavated from the mostly darkened house, including cigarette butts, crayons, a sponge and copper muffin tins, are collected in glass jars and displayed in a spot-lit cabinet of curiosities in the front room. The various components of Stanford's other interventions require careful sleuthing by the visitor, aided by a flashlight.

The wallpaper in a ground-floor room that was once the kitchen is printed with a faded, barely noticeable geometric pattern that Stanford translates into red, yellow and black minimalist sculptures on waist-high marble pedestals. Were it not for the crumbling walls, peeling paint and bad light, this room could easily pass for a contemporary art gallery (the polished hardwood floor doesn't hurt). Elsewhere, a china cabinet is filled with nearly a dozen pink plastic lobsters, echoing a wallpaper pattern on the other side of the doorway. In a second-floor parlor furnished with a sagging sofa, an old black-and-white Zenith television plays looped footage from an Ali-Frazier fight. A scavenger hunt of nearby walls turns up a 1970s newspaper clipping about another boxing match, tacked next to a stamp-size reproduction of a poster for Jaws. The Jaws reference is extended in a slope-ceilinged room on the top floor, where Stanford has decorated one wall with a giant pencil drawing of a toothy shark. A cookout theme takes over another upper-floor sitting room, where a scrap of faded wallpaper comes to life in sculptural re-creations of a white picket fence, an overflowing bag of charcoal, a barbeque pit and a pig roasting on a spit.

Wandering around the creaking and dank house, one discovers pairs of watchful googly eyes and delicately drawn frames surrounding dusty raccoon tracks on the walls. Pittsburgh's North Side, where the Mattress Factory is located, is making a comeback from post-industrial abandonment and neglect. As a reminder of our collective past, Stanford's project subtly illuminates the life cycle of what was once someone's home.