From Daniel Arsham/Snarkitecture: "DIG explores the architecture of excavation. Storefront's distinctive gallery space will be filled with a solid volume of EPS architectural foam, engulfing the existing interior in an unyielding flood of white. The volume will then be excavated using simple tools—hammers, picks and chisels—to transform a stock industrial material into a strange, unexpected cavern for both work and play.
DIG will be developed in three stages:
Exhibition. In an act of pre-representation, the exhibition will showcase a series of studies developed a priori in relationship to questions of form (in relation to the gallery's idiosyncratic plan and façade) and program (desires and notions of inhabitation and play). These studies, materialized in the medium of conceptual models are an elaboration of works that shift from plan, to elevation to section to material studies. (March 1–March 28)
Installation. The gallery will be filled almost in its totality, transforming the entire space into a deep façade where the pieces on display will be intensified by different points and lines of vision perceptible from both the interior of Storefront and the gallery space of the street. (March 29–April 4)
Performance. In the third and final stage, Arsham/Snarkitecture will both create and inhabit DIG for the duration of the subsequent month-long installation, carving spaces first for inhabitation and in a second stage for collective gatherings in a performance open to public view. (April 5–23)
Parallel to the exhibition, a series of talks, excursions and encounters happening inside the work in progress will address the emerging forms of the installation in relation to contemporary notions of collectivity and inhabitation in the quest for moments of architectural reinvention and surprise.
Daniel Arsham's practice straddles the lines between art, architecture and performance. With a penchant for collaboration his expanded practice has included collaborations with Merce Cunningham, Hedi Slimane, Robert Wilson and Jonah Bokaer. He makes architecture do things it's not supposed to do, mining everyday experience for opportunities to confuse and confound our expectations of space and form. Simple yet paradoxical gestures dominate his sculptural work: a façade that appears to billow in the wind, a white cube eroded on all sides like a glacier, a figure wrapped up in the surface of a wall. Structural experiment, historical inquiry, and satirical wit all combine with consummate technical skill in Arsham's ongoing interrogation of the real and the imagined.
Snarkitecture
Snarkitecture is a collaborative practice operating in territories between the disciplines of art and architecture. Working within existing spaces or in collaboration with other artists and designers, the practice focuses on the investigation of structure, material and program and how these elements can be manipulated to serve new and imaginative purposes. Searching for sites within architecture with the possibility for confusion or misuse, Snarkitecture aims to make architecture perform the unexpected.
OPENING: Tuesday, March 1, 7pm
Until 23 April 2011
DIG
Storefront for Art and Architecture
New York