Upper West Side Apartment Becomes a Gallery Until the Lease Runs Out

By Carol Tannenhauser

Audrey Wright, 36, and Geoffrey Robertson, 42, have been married for nearly eight years. When they met, they were from completely different worlds. Geoff was a user-experience researcher for a tech company, while Audrey was a violinist with the Baltimore Symphony.

“We met through online dating,” she said, when the Rag visited them recently. “It was an interesting experience and we really clicked.” 

In 2020, Audrey won a spot on the New York Philharmonic, “but, of course, the world shut down,” she said. She ultimately debuted in New York in 2022, and the couple moved to the Upper West Side, to a rental on West 72nd Street near West End Avenue. 

It was their dream apartment.

“This really was a magical home for us, a place where you feel like you’re at the center of the universe. As you can see, the light is beautiful in this apartment. And so we really made a nest here for ourselves,” Audrey said.

Then, in 2026, the building was sold.

Their lease was running out, and the new landlord raised their rent on the renewal to a level they couldn’t afford. Then there was “the absolute mayhem of the construction going on in the building, including constant noise and dust, which is the biggest problem, dust all over the place,” Geoff said. “It’s like six-plus crews that are here working constantly.”

As if that weren’t enough, their downstairs neighbor smoked cigarettes incessantly, and the fumes seeped up into their apartment.

“For the sake of our mental and physical health, we rented a place up on 110th Street and moved out,” Audrey said.

But they still had a couple of months left on their old lease, and enough savings to carry it, so they decided to “use that time to create something beautiful and honor this place,” Geoff said.

It would be an art installation – they would convert the apartment into a gallery – showcasing the projects they had worked on together while they lived there, primarily, the unique “nests” that Geoff, who had found his calling as a visual artist/maker during the pandemic, had been creating for the past three-and-a-half years.

There are 33 of them of different sizes, hanging from the ceiling of what once was their living room, all woven from “the used, broken, or otherwise discarded violin, viola, cello, and double-bass strings that I’ve collected from musicians around the world,” Geoff explained. “I think there’s something beautiful about giving these strings a second life. And when you think of the amount of time and patience and practice and blood and sweat and tears musicians of this caliber put into the perfection of their craft, it all gets ground into these strings.”

“The nests are modeled after the nests created by weaver birds, those that can actually tie knots to create these elaborate nests,” Geoff continued. “The idea was to make something very lifelike… I married into Audrey’s world. I knew nothing of classical music. And it’s very much the world that I have found myself in. If you look at birds in whatever environment they’re living in, they create their homes out of the material that’s around them. I have made my home within her world.”

But the exhibition, called “The Community,” clearly combines both of their worlds. As the nests are programmed to move, the spectator is immersed in a choreographed “soundscape,” composed and performed by Audrey. “You’ll hear a lot of imitative birds and other kinds of natural sounds,” Geoff said, “but it’s all done on the violin.”

I wandered among the nests, listening to the sounds, enjoying the morning sun, and marveling at the different ways people live their lives in our especially creative community. It was a lovely way to spend time.

If you’d like a private showing, “The Community” and other of Geoff’s works can be experienced by appointment until June 26. Contact: geoff@geoffrobertson.me

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