"Aesthetics/Anesthetics" Exhibition
Storefront for Art and Architecture
This event has ended.
Aesthetics/Anesthetics is an exhibition of 30 newly commissioned architectural drawings by 30 emerging and established architects and firms at Storefront for Art and Architecture. Each commissioned drawing depicts the Storefront Gallery space at 97 Kenmare. The drawings reveal different aspects of the space and are representative of the generative properties of the architect's drawing.
The exhibition positions the commissioned drawings opposite a wallpaper of representational clichés, including birds, axonometries, children, green, and comics, that are typically used as representational tools to enlighten renderings in order to examine the aesthetic and anesthetic qualities of the architectural drawing. The gallery space, wallpapered with these sourced images cut from drawings produced in the past ten years, will describe how architects have used, perhaps excessively, specific graphic devices to ignite certain feelings and properties in their drawings that the architectural drawing itself is unable to convey: skies filled with birds to portray movement, axonometries as a mode of applied intellectuality, children as life generators, green surfaces as magic ecological surfaces, or comics as prosthetic communicative devices.
Aesthetics/Anesthetics invites audiences to reflect on the performing properties of the architectural drawing, its purpose and its aesthetic qualities, and invites one to push drawing, and with it architecture, beyond inherited acknowledged values. What is it that an architectural drawing does and how does it do it? How can we distill beauty from cosmetics? How can new modes of representation produce new architectures and new sensibilities?
Of the exhibition, Curator and Director of Storefront Eva Franch says, "An image (and its after-image) carries within itself a history or performative script of characters, discourses, and conventions. During the last ten years there has been a resurgence of certain representational devices and clichés that operate almost as placeholders or decorative devices to an architecture unable to draw itself. We all have seen them: birds on beautiful skies, happy children with balloons, those axonometries. This exhibition is an invitation to let those clichés go and explore the performativity of the architectural drawing as a way to generate a new imaginary. The 30 drawings on display are an open door to reclaim a lost territory: the drawing."
Media
Schedule
from June 27, 2012 to July 28, 2012
Opening Reception on 2012-06-26 from 18:00 to 20:00