Space about 2,000 square feet | Rent $1,525
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The walls of Derek Erdman’s apartment are covered in an ever-changing display of his own art: bold, graphic paintings of ice cream cones, comics characters, sports legends, 80s TV stars, politicians, animals, and other pop culture ephemera. There are also letters he fashioned from scavenged wood to spell out I LOVED YOU; a transparency of a photo of a young child (not his) stuck to a huge interior window; and a pair of baggies containing a link of sausage from a Denny’s in Los Angeles and a piece of bacon Erdman fried himself in Chicago.
The spaces someone else might turn into a living room have been outfitted in a strangely inhospitable fashion–no sofas, no TV, just some frame chairs, plants, and a Wurlitzer organ Erdman bangs on now and then. “I went out of my way to not make them comfortable–they’re rooms for putting things in, as opposed to people,” he says. The space with the Wurlitzer is walled off in part by a painting of a clean-cut guy giving a topless woman the Heimlich maneuver as a bald man in a bow tie remarks, “He is helpin’ her.” The apartment’s only natural bedroom, separated from the Wurlitzer room by sliding glass patio doors, is occupied by Erdman’s roommate, Julia Rickert; Erdman himself sleeps in a “room” he created using the metal shelves that hold his massive record collection as walls. Nearby, painted canvas partitions hide his small office area from view.
