#core studio

[annwithanartplan]

Core Studio Presentation

[facade-design]

Self Shading Insulated Glass Unit (SSIGU) – Collaborative Research with EnneadLab - Thornton Tomasetti

Ennead Architects recently approached us to collaboratively submit an entry for a custom designed self shading insulated glazing unit for the TexFab competition.This post reviews the process we took to design an innovative IGU. … Continue reading →

[improvbuff]

Contact Improvisation Jam is donation based. I recommend taking a class about contact improvisation BEFORE going to a jam because you CAN get hurt doing this dance. Not because the moves are strenuous, but because you need to have a language to refuse or accept certain moves from your partner/partners. very fun and facilitates self growth. Here’s their FB page for more info: https://www.facebook.com/AtlantaContact?fref=nf

[necamart]

Once the idea of the piece is established in the artist’s mind and the final form is decided, the process is carried out blindly. There are many side effects that the artist cannot imagine. These may be used as ideas for new works. Sol Lewitt

It was hard to pick out just one sentence from the thirty-five that Sol Lewitt wrote on art; I guess it’s a good sign that so many of them resonated with me as being factual.

I chose this sentence to dwell upon because of the significance of it. The process of making a piece is one of the most important parts of making art, and yet it is very much an open process. When I make art, I focus almost entirely on what I want to accomplish, not so much on the steps I need to take to get there. It’s important to keep one’s mind on the goal, or they’ll get lost and make something unlike what they were intending.

There are indeed side effects to making art, especially when the idea in question calls for new materials or techniques to be used. The process of making is never ending, we make ideas for works that need to be made, and in the process of making we make innovation in technique and we make new ideas to repeat the process over again.

That’s at least how I see things.

[necamart]

This drive was a revealing experience. The road and much of the landscape was artificial, and yet it couldn't be called a work of art. On the other hand, it did something for me that art had never done. At first I didn't know what it was, but its effect was to liberate me from many of the views I had had about art. It seemed that there had been a reality there which had not had any expression in art. Tony Smith's account of a nightly ride on the unfinished New Jersey Turnpike

I don't necessarily agree with this. I am one who thinks that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and that art is to be found everywhere if one can only see it. An artificial landscape had to be designed by someone, and even though it's a purely functional structure there is still something about it that is beautiful. A marvel of human engineering, like looking at any of the many Roman aqueducts.

The statement makes sense if you look at it in the context of Tony Smith's work, the bulky artificial structures he made through the years might not seem obvious as something that would be considered "art," and yet the intention is still there; the focus with his work is merely more towards form than to function.

[necamart]

PRIME TIME OF YOUR LIFE NOW LIVE IT PRIME TIME ROBO FIVE

[necamart]

Theaster Gates Lecture Review

I was particularly drawn to Theaster’s passion and involvement with buildings and his community. His reclamation of materials from demolished buildings can be seen as a means of preserving that building, or as recycling materials that would have otherwise been trashed.

His going into and playing for a dying church stood out to me, the image of him playing the cello is burned into my memory. His “last sermon” for something as holy as a church built in the 1890’s, one that he didn’t have the means to save, was powerful and poignant. One goes to a church to worship, to have their soul saved, and yet the Church was unable to be saved.

What makes one building more worthy of preservation than another? Theaster spoke of buildings being preserved because it means a fat check for a contractor, or of it being destroyed because it happens to be in a black, yellow, whatever colored neighborhood where it’s not “culturally significant” enough to be saved.

Speaking on the Dorchester Project, where he acquires abandoned buildings, guts them, creates art from the innards and uses the funds to restore and refurbish with found materials; is almost creating a performance out of the bureaucracy of saving a building. He spoke of talking to and spending money on lawyers for three hours every day to give money away, I wonder how many hoops he has to jump through to preserve a building? He gives the reclaimed building an entirely new purpose, and everything that goes into the rebirth of the building has a story of its own. It’s beautiful. Perhaps it’s all for the church that he was unable to save.

It’s something that I can relate to and something that I want to do in Baltimore, where there are so many desolate and abandoned buildings waiting for death or rebirth. Recently an incentive was put in place to draw people to come and make something of these piles of history. I’ve wanted to do something for the area and after seeing Theaster’s lecture I have more ideas and inspiration, if I can manage to get to that place in my life and survive the loopholes of bureaucracy.  I wonder what he would do with the wealth of material in Baltimore?