at Neutral Ground Contemporary Art Forum in Regina, Sask. She's installed an amazing vinyl wall drawing, and she writes to us:
"The piece in Regina presented new problems in terms of install but we surpassed them. The premask was barely sticking to the vinyl because of the type of ink used. It was a beautiful rich satin finish but hard to work with. I'm attaching a few snapshots!
Finished piece: 12 feet tall, about 3 feet on the floor and 20 feet wide. The piece is a tracing of a tracing of a tracing. It's an apartment block in Poland, the one I used to live in and where my aunt lives now, that I traced in ink onto a plastic-like material, cut that out, photographed it as a 3-D maquette, retraced it in illustrator, printed it and cut it out to be a two dimensional shadow of it's former self. It references it's flat 3-D state by the white lines cutting through the black that hint at peeling or bending."
Looks amazing, Dagmara...sorry we won't see it in person. But luckily, we still have two more weeks to enjoy your installation here at KWT contemporary.
A not-great snapshot of the wall painting at KWT contemporary...I'll replace it with a better one soon.
Here is curator John G Hampton's statement for "Unplanned Architectures" at Neutral Ground:
"Within artistic production, architecture is a discussion about society and interactions, while within the discourses of capitalism, architecture is a commodity, whose production rises and falls according to periods of growth or recession. "Unplanned Architectures" looks at artists' representation of the architectural plan in our current state of global instability and uncertainty. During the great depression, there was a dramatic rise in "paper architects" (architects who focused on plans for buildings and cities that were never meant to actually be built). Similarly the great recession offers us the unique opportunity to rethink our place in this world; it is a time for architectural experimentation, to examine the philosophical implications of our constructed environments and our relationships with them.
The "unplanned" here is multiple: it is the architectural cousin to capitalism or other unplanned economies (market architecture), it is the architecture of necessity that is borne from crises, it is the unforeseen forms that emerge from buildings as living systems (living architecture), it is the intuitive patching together of previous forms like the Frankensteinian advancement of Western civilization (automatic architecture). As the consequences of sprawl and deregulation become widely apparent, the architecture of our current system is readying to be uprooted, to be rebuilt yet while this market architecture is being dismantled, what will replace it is unknown. The artists in this exhibit use new media, sculpture and installation to provide insight into our current state of limbo. While we demolish the foundation on which we stand, they illustrate our fascination with the collapse, they illuminate our feelings of dread and excitement, they examine failings in analogous architectural shifts, while all along appreciating the beauty of the uncertain and emergent structures that rise from the natural movement of cities, buildings and culture."
