Saturday, February 27, 2010

Context/Shift/Process

A sneak preview of the LoQ installation...
































Sunday, February 14, 2010

Landscapes of Quarantine



























"The house where he lived was quarantined, and all the people directly exposed were confined in it...Quarantine houses had guards stationed about them, who allowed no one to go in or out during the season of quarantine. The quarantine people were vaccinated, and during the time until it could be determined whether the vaccination would take, they were supplied with food. When the vaccination took, the person under quarantine was bathed, given new clothing in place of the old, which was burned, and he was then discharged. When a house had been emptied of people under quarantine, the bedding and curtains were burned, sulphur burned in all the rooms, and the walls sprayed with corrosive sublimate. None of the inspectors or guards were allowed to enter any of the houses under quarantine, when there was danger; and the doctors that did the vaccinating saturated their clothing with the corrosive sublimate before and after entering a house...The clothing and bedding were either paid for at a reasonable price by the board of health, or were replaced by new articles. In one of the houses quarantined, there were 31 laboring men who were inclined to object to the rules of quarantine. One escaped, but he was taken back when found, and a guard, with a rifle and instructions to shoot should he attempt to escape, was put over him..."

-SCIENCE, A Weekly Newspaper of All the Arts and Sciences, v. XIII no. 323, April 12, 1889, p. 278.

"The slow realization that these were the properties of the house, embedded in the very stones that possessed a fatality in themselves, that the house was itself an uncanny power, came unwillingly, against all reason, the more disquieting for the absolute normality of the setting, its veritable absence of overt terror."

-Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny, Essays in the Modern Unhomely (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1992), p.18.


I couldn't be more excited to be participating in the LANDSCAPES OF QUARANTINE exhibition at Storefront for Art and Architecture. I am humbled to be part of such a stellar group. Check out the Storefront site for more information. The opening for the exhibition will be March 9, 2010. I will be presenting 'CONTEXT/shift', an installation piece that riffs on the iconic Holl/Acconci Storefront facade. The photo-montages above are preliminary studies.