SO-AD was commissioned by the Mattress Factory Art Museum to create a site-specific installation for their exhibition series, "Gestures".
The goal for this site-specific installation was to address the binary nature of the two parallel galleries located in a turn of the century light industrial building. Our chosen “site” was a doorway that had been hastily boarded up for a previous exhibition. By removing access through this doorway, two distinct spaces had been created, accessible only from 75’ in the opposite direction.
Our impulse was to rejoin the galleries, yet maintain the distinction. A simple construction of stacked sheets of corrugated plastic replaced the opaque infill. The result was simultaneously a door, a wall, a window, and none of the above. Aurally there was no separation, conversations on one side of the wall were surreptitiously monitored from the other, children pressed their faces tightly against the construct to communicate magically through a wall, and curious adults slowly paced forward and backward trying to gain the vantage point that was always just out of their reach.
POV collapsed sensual information from the adjoining gallery into an image, an array of noise and pixels recomposed into a flat, yet dynamic field. Figures moved across the field with little derivation due to proximity or distance. Perspective appeared foreshortened and closer examination of the material led to a decrease in visual information thus subverting perspective and perception.
The temporal nature of the piece was a consideration from its inception. Therefore, the work had to act as an image. Its impermanence was not an issue. In fact, the work fulfils its purpose only because of its limited lifespan. The project was an experiment, articulated in full scale, but understood as an image.
It conflated the sensual experiences of the viewers, it subverted the traditional architectural role of its source, and it formed an image as architecture.
**
Press
"An exceptional work -- made more so by its understated quality -- is "P.O.V." by SO-AD, a minimalist grid that transforms a doorway, playing with issues of architecture, space, perspective ("points of view"), even the positioning of the lenses through which one sees the world."
- Mary Thomas "Art Review: Sweeping 'Gestures' brings together powerful images." Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
+
"But most ingenious is the work of SO-AD...who filled the entirety of a doorway with three-inch-wide strips of corrugated plastic sheeting. The stacked strips of sheeting produce a most interesting visual effect when looking through them at various distances."
Kurt Shaw "Site-specific exhibition makes good use of Mattress Factory's fourth floor." Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
**
Status: Completed 2005
Location: Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Gallery: The Mattress Factory Art Museum
Curators: Michael Olijnyk, Graham Shearing
Team: David Burns, Abigail Gray
|