Architectural Identity Construction
On SITE seeing at Charlotte Street Foundation.
SITE Seeing asks its audience to peer beyond edifice and seek dimension through shadow. Here, with architectural works that depict obscuration of the organic, eschew expected horizon lines, and question how social determinations are formed by spatial construction, we imagine what fills.
Upon entering the gallery, Cory Antis offers a passage in the form of a book object enclosed in a glass case. Its untouchable pages are composed of site-specific textural impressions (frottages) from around the city. An object that invites motion and a text constructed by motion between sites, both unreachable to the audience, renders a distance. Antis compels the viewer to fill/feel beyond exteriority in order to traverse this space. In the density that backfills the exterior, both the viewer and artist become archivers of the mundane constructs that determine geography and, therein, the trajectory and culture of our collectives.
Antis’s object is accompanied by Caleb Taylor’s conSTRUCTS, a photocopied collage of cubes and fence wiring hollowed with precise incisions, layered and reassembled to form an eyelet. Both pieces compel the viewer beyond and implicate their gaze in the reification of scarce, geometric compositions into functions of passage.
Collectively, the artists use skeleton constructs, sight lines, and textural schematics to craft shadows for interiority. It leaves the viewer to imagine what structures obscure, what they hold, and what emerges from or around them. Skeletons of construction that problematize place and origin, site/sight lines as a transformational function of portals, and textural schematics cultivate a depth of feeling within otherwise astringent structures.
Both Avantika Bawa and Mie Kongo use three-dimensional pieces to look through the edifice to the organic individual. Kongo’s sculptural assemblages use shadow to elongate the works. Combining tenuous materials such as wood, metal, and wool felt, Kongo augments tensions between constructivism and decay, form and function. Bawa’s whiteonwhiteonwhite scaffolding casts shadows and transforms the scale of the gallery. As the mechanism of structural manifestation (from the blueprint onto the blue collar), the construction tool is displaced in its removal from function, but belongs in its presence everyplace, as starting (and mending) place for interiority.
Bawa’s scaffolding both originates and extends the scale of Taylor’s wallpaper installation. The wall, opposite the skeleton, is curled and layered like shingles or a thatched roof. The composition evokes the collectivism of wheat-pasting or graffiti, site-specific collective works, while the repetition of the inkjet prints gives it a commercial effect, the homogenization of modern architectural development. The shingled wallpaper begs for movement, for a breeze, for a disturbance. This desire is fulfilled by Cybele Lyle’s Some of the Parts.
Lyle invites viewers to take a fragment of the painted textile in exchange for a photo of the disassembled in its new environment. Here, the audience’s embodiment—their gaze, aesthetic preferences, and participatory conviction—literally moves the piece, beyond site (stagnancy) and beyond sight (of the gallery audience).
SITE seeing’s inquiries into perception abstract the construction of architectural artworks, site, and the viewers' identity in relation to symbol.
