Installation for "Denied and Underexposed"

I have been hoping to do a large-scale installation for a long time. I finally found the opportunity with the Denied and Underexposed Art Show that happened Friday night in the Kress building downtown.

The Kress is basically one giant room that stretches all the way through its city block from the famous Dexter Ave to Monroe Street. Because of this, I decided to create a ceiling plane that would offer a sense of intimacy and enclosure that could not be found elsewhere in the space. My first decision was materiality. I quickly picked card stock paper mainly because that's all I could afford but also for its potential to reflect and diffuse light. One intention for the installation was for it to create juxtaposition between itself and the space. Against the Kress' strict structural rhythm and derelict finishes would be the prestine-ness of white paper arranged in an expressive, organic form. I experimented with card stock sheets using cuts and folds to create a module with shape, structure, and opening.

I decided on a pattern that creates a smooth curvature, a defined crease, and a system of notching to hold the pieces together. I created four iterations of the module pattern that vary in the degree of curvature and consequently scale of opening. I used 390 of these paper modules to create a 14'X16' surface.

  

I took on a little more than I should have, which I have a tendency to do, and spent every spare moment of this last week trying to finish the piece. Thanks to a couple nights of less than 3 hours of sleep, some vacation hours from work, and the help of my friends Mike and Scott, I actually finished in time. The show was a blast, and I'm already looking to the next opportunity to do another installation.

FiN Submissions

These were my submissions for the Future is Now.  This first one is a proposal for an "incremental" urban park the City has been talking about.  Replacing a parking lot with a public park is a great idea, but the images the Development Department had put out were uninspiring and unresponsive to the human needs for which the park should provide -- like shade and seating.  Click the image below to see the actual proposal with diagrams and explanations.

The next is an idea of how to reuse some of the unsightly parking decks around downtown.  The concept is basically 1) to infill the bottom with leasable space that would activate the sidewalk with pedestrian life while still providing parking above 2) clad the parking floors to make the building feel more like part of the urban fabric.



Finally is a proposal I did with a Mike Shows for the riverfront entry.  We heard the City was wanting to improve the entry and give it prominence (with very little money) so we showed some simple changes to make the underground entry noticeable and more inviting.  I think of it as a temporary solution... maybe soon we can design a more inspiring and permanent intervention.

FiN exhibition

(This post is a little overdue.)  A couple Friday's ago, I had the pleasure of being involved with "the Future is Now," an exhibition put on by Helicity of Montgomery.  Though I had recklessly procrastinated, my submissions for the show came along more efficiently than I had expected.  After sending them to the printers - and paying way too much for it - I somehow still had a night to work up some last minute programs for the show.  They were nothing too fancy; my main intent was clarity... but I did do some geometric play with Helvetica.

Having nearly finished the programs, I thought I could finally take a break the night before the show, until my friend Mike wanted me to stop by and give my thoughts on set up for the exhibition... which ended meaning staying up until 3 in the morning to help him make an impromptu installation out of rope and old sheets of plywood - go figure.

Though exhausting, we probably had too much fun figuring out different ways for the rope to interface with the timber columns.  Our favorite was one in which the rope basically folded around one corner of the column before shooting up to the ceiling and back down to another:

To terminate the rope, we unravelled the ends and poked them through a floor vent at the foot of the last column as if these parasitic fibers, having found there way into the space, had stretched themselves across its structure... it seemed so witty at 2 in the morning.  After all of this, I did not feel too selfish taking some of this new prime real estate for two of my own boards:

The show was a lot of fun... great people, good music, tons of ideas.  I'll post my actual submissions in the next couple of days, but until then HERE was one of my favorites from the show.