Most house guests don’t change your decor.

Now in its sixth year, the Artist-in-Residence exhibition at Evergreen House “House Guests” features painter Amy Chan’s “Views of the Mid-Atlantic” and installation artist Richard Torchia’s “House Lights and Furniture Music: Treatments for a suite of shaded rooms.”

“The projects on view were developed in response to my exploration of the Evergreen House and the history of its inhabitants,” Torchia said.

Through the program, an artist is invited to reside in the Evergreen House for two months during the summer.

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Drawing from inspiration during his or her time in the house, the artist then displays personal works in the fall exhibition series, which ends with a meet-the-artist program in January.

In his work titled “Cue,” Torchia elevates his curiosity about the lives of the three Garrett brothers growing up at Evergreen House to re-create their experiences in the Billiard Room, which was built for their recreation, along with a bowling alley and gymnasium, in the early 1880s. Torchia made digital recordings of the sound of the balls being knocked against each other on the exact table that was once in the room. 

He then transferred these sounds to a record that is replayed by tour guides on a 1905 RCA victor phonograph sitting on a table in the room where the billiard table once stood.

“I’m taking the memory of the old room and making it alive while using the old-fashioned media of a wind-up vitrolla,” Torchia said. “So you’re receiving the feeling of everything in the present even though you know it’s in the past.”

Chan’s well-renowned “Peaceable Kingdom” tactfully and humorously depicts a loosely mapped out version of an American landscape that has been displaced by commercialism. In one scenario, Chan paints two antelopes standing helplessly in front of a Whole Foods store that has destroyed these animals’ habitat, displaying the irony that these animals may be living in a not so peaceable kingdom.

“I want people to ask the same ecological questions I ask myself through these paintings. How much development is too much?” Chan said.

The exhibition features 27 paintings from Chan and eight temporary installations by Torchia.