Whim by Heidi Hunter

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No 1

January 2013

SCREENPRINTER the MODERN bold prints from the industryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s best

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design rooted in the handmade

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January 2013

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January 2013

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design rooted in the handmade

N o1 January 2013 OWNER & FOUNDER Lara Hedberg Deam

PRESIDENT & PUBLISHER Michela Oâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;Connor Abrams

Lucy Bradley CREATIVE DIRECTOR Claudia Bruno EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

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Megan Mansell Williams Editorial Intern Christopher Bright Senior Designer Brendan Callahan Design Production Manager Kathryn Hansen Designer Emily CM Anderson Marketing Art Director Gayle Chin Photo Editor Kate Stone Associate Photo Editor Aya Brackett Contributing Photo Editor Deborah Kozloff Hearey Photo Intern Kane Fried Senior Production Director Fran Fox Production Specialist Bill Lyons Production Coordinator Joy Pascual Contributing Editors

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ABOUT THE COVER: Artist: Hannah Waldron Title: Best Aviary Medium: Screenprint, 4 color. Photographed by: Adam Krause see page 28 for the full feature

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January 2013

contents features

January 2013

22 A FLEX OF FRAGILITY

Artist Mia Pearlmanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s colossal paper sculptures are a balance of delicacy and mass. BY JACQUELINE RUYAK

28 THE BOLD AND THE BEAUTIFUL

This array of designers create bold, geometric screenprints. BY MIKE PERRY

22 36 INNOVATIVE TRADITION

Birmingham native Holly Hollon shows that calligraphy and illustration are anything but old-fashioned. BY HENRY URBACH

42 THE ART OF THE UNEDITED

Using his large-format camera, colorful tape, and a mirror, Akihiko Miyoshi creates interesting abstract imagery without post-editing. BY MADISON SIMMS

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January 2013

contents departments

January 2013 10 EDITOR’S LETTER

12 EDITOR WISHLISTS 14 IN STUDIO

Stitch Design Co. Katie Daisy

17 IN PROCESS Jill DeHaan Julia Pott

18 UNCONVENTIONAL

Chinese Dishu Calligraphy Thread Art

44 RETROSPECTIVE Charley Harper

18 17

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

ancient art modernized

Dear Reader, There ’s just something about the tangible. That’s probably one of the reasons why you’re holding this magazine as opposed to reading it on the computer or an e-reader. In a media-saturated world, isn’t it refreshing to sit in a comfy chair, kick up your feet, and read something on paper as opposed to a screen? It’s clear that despite the advancements in technology and interactive design, people are still enthralled with things made by hand. Whim was created to highlight the handdone processes and aspects of modern design. The word “whim” denotes a certain informality and spontaneity, reflecting the sudden ideas designers obtain during their process. This is not to exclude the benefits of technology however. On the contrary, technology and handmade design are often used together to bring modernity to methods of the past. You’ll see in this issue how designer and illustrator Holly Hollon utilizes the time-honored art of copperplate calligraphy in tandem with typography for modern, elegant, and, for lack of a better word, whimsical design applications (see “Innovative Tradition,” pg. 36). It’s amazing to see the ways that hand-done processes can enhance an overall design. Here ’s to the handmade,

LUCY BRADLEY EDITOR IN CHIEF

January 2013

editor’s picks

“I’d love anything from Rifle Paper Co.” – Kristen Davis, design editor

2013 Cities Calendar, $26, riflepaperco.com

PENGUIN DROP CAP SERIES DIANA F+ CAMERA

“There’s just something about the nostalgia of using a film camera. The irregularities in color and texture add to the charm of the photo.” – Amy Dodd, photo editor

“I’ve followed Jessica Hische’s Daily Drop Cap blog since she started it, so when I found out Penguin was doing a 26 volume series featuring them, I was so excited.” – Catherine Weiss, copy editor Assorted titles, $22 each, amazon.com

$89, usa.shop.lomography.com

THE COMPLETE ENGRAVER “I’ve been wanting to try my hand at calligraphy for awhile now, and this guide shares the etiquette of social stationary without being stuffy.” – Callie Mulligan, senior editor $29.95, amazon.com

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January 2013

instudio

STITCH DESIGN CO. — t he new corporate —

Right: Courtney Rowson (right) and Amy Pastre (left) formed Stitch Design Co. in 2009 after being friends and running a letterpress printing shop together. Stitch is a fullservice design firm that specializes in branding, identity materials and packaging, as well as digital projects. Below: Stitch is headquartered in a 1940s storefront that for the prior 60 years housed a shoe repair shop. Rowson and Pastre renovated the workspace, and they display rotating work samples in the windows.

Right: The inside of the studio is filled with inspiring photos and art pieces as well as beautiful vintage-inspired pieces. Their sister letterpress printing company is housed in the building behind Stitch’s studio.

Located in Historic Charleston, SC, this small design firm mixes sophisticated tradition with modern elements. Amy Pastre and Courtney Rowson own and run this southern gem that emphasizes tactile quality in their work.

Amy Pastre and Courtney Rowson met serendipitously while working on design projects for a local ad agency and soon became fast friends. Within months, they decided to take a leap of faith and advance their friendship to the next level: They purchased a vintage letterpress and together opened a printing shop dubbed Sideshow Press. As Sideshow grew over time, the duo decided to launch another collaborative venture; this time as a full-service design studio called Stitch. Like its sister company Sideshow —which the duo still operates and oversees—Stitch has already carved out a name for itself in the design community. “It’s all motivated by our clients,” Pastre says. “We ’re not only collaborative with each other, but also with our clients. We care about whether or not our work is successful for them.” That’s evident when they start talking about one of their

recent clients, the Rewined Candle Company, who commissioned them to update the packaging for their handcrafted candles, which repurpose discarded wine bottles as containers for the luminaries. By implementing thoughtful details-such as kraftpaper labels featuring hand-drawn type, wax seals that color code each varietal scent and a letterpressed wood veneer disk that sits atop the candle to ward off dust-they created a packaging system that was both smart and striking. “We extracted a lot of information from the client and took all that feedback to come up with a solution that’s beautiful and functional,” Rowson says. Their hard work paid off as the client saw sales of his candles increase more than 1,000% (no, that’s not a typo) since the redesign was implemented. “We have a general attitude that no job is boring or not interesting or too small,” Pastre explains about their desire to go above and beyond on every project. “We really try to come at every project as if it could be the next big design solution and give it our all.” – CARMEN SECHRIST

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instudio

1 1. The hand-done details of this stationary package for Barlow & Bishop, an interiors firm in Charleston, SC, reflect the aesthetics of their work. 2. This invitation was part of a campaign created for the AIGA South Carolina 2010 InShow. The work was inspired by vintage grocery ephemera.

3. The creative duo knew they wanted to use a type treatment in their branding, so they paired it with visuals inspired by vintage sewing ephemera. The result reflects not only the companyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s name, but also the tailored design sensibility they bring to their work. 4. For a current branding project for a new venue in Charleston, SC called Cannon Green, Stitch hired Sarah Jeffers Beauchene of Reclaimed Artistry to paint a mural on the side of the building. They sought to preserve the history while sparking the interest of the public. 5. Mixson, a new community within the Park Circle neighborhood in North Charleston, was opening a Bath and Racquet Club. Stitch worked with them to brand and plan a launch event for this new alternative to the traditional swim and social club.

6. Stitch has the opportunity to work with a variety of clients including artists. For this project, they are working with painter Lulie Wallace to turn her layered paintings on mylar into textiles.

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January 2013

unconventions unconventional

CHINESE DISHU CALLIGRAPHY — ephemeral art form— Interview between Steven Heller and François Chastanet

Above: Dishu practitioner Bai Yunzhu says it “doesn’t just exercise your fingers and wrists. By standing up in the right posture, practicing affects the whole body. Especially if you want to write perfect and elegant strokes, proper strength is required.”

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Very popular nowadays, this recent phenomenon appeared in the beginning of the 1990s in a park in the north of Beijing before spreading in most of major Chinese cities. Thousands of anonymous street calligraphers operate daily in parks and streets, the different pavements becoming a large paper surface. Displaying literature, poetry or aphorisms, these monumental letterings, ranging from static regular to highly cursive styles, convoke the whole body in a spontaneous dance and infinite formal renewals. The calligraphic practice corresponds to a research of self accomplishment or improvement, this improvement modifying our perception of the world. In China cosmology, the square or ‹di› represents the earth and the circle represents the sky; ‹shu› signifies book, writing by association. The expression ‹dishu› literaly means square calligraphy, i.e. earth calligraphy: practicing ephemeral calligraphy on the ground, using clear water as ink. The documentary photographer, filmmaker, and designer François Chastanet has been developing a fascinating multimedia project: Di Shu, a survey of contemporary calligraphic practices in Chinese public spaces. The photographic and video documentary began during the summer of 2011 in Beijing, Xi’an, Shanghai, and Shenyang.

HELLER: You’ve done books on Pixação, the Brazilian graffiti lettering, and Los Angeles’s Cholo street lettering. In each case they are distinct codes designed to appeal to specific groups. What attracted you to Di Shu Chinese street calligraphy?

I was firstly interested in documenting a graffiti practice outside of the occidental/Latin alphabet’s global influence, so I have been looking for a similar practice of massive writing in public space, but this time in an ideogrammatic and logographic civilization. After some research in Asia, Di Shu, or water-based ground calligraphy in China, imposed itself by its growing popularity. We are not talking here of small underground groups of writers or gangs mainly composed of young people, but about probably several million street-calligraphy practitioners. CHASTANET:

And unlike in São Paulo and Los Angeles, this practice is largely accepted and respected socially. But even if they’re emerging from very different urban cultures— from so-called vandal graffiti to widely accepted practices like Di Shu—related issues can be noticed. For example: written signs’ formal evolutions, their relation with public space and architectural context, and the use of efficient handcrafted tools made of everyday industrial objects. Chinese street calligraphy, using water as ink on the pavement, is also very interesting by its ephemeral nature; it is an ode to impermanence.

Left and Above: Chinese adult practices his Chinese characters using the Dishu technique. Many people create their own “brushes” using a long shaft made of wood or metal and a shaped sponge (brush examples on pg. 20).

H: What have you learned about the form and the people who make it?

It is extremely difficult for an outsider to say something relevant about the Chinese art of writing forms. Not as an expert of hanzi shapes but as an (occidental) observer sensible to the relation between large-format manual inscriptions and public space, I prefered to simply present the roots of this handwriting phenomenon and its actual development in Chinese society. I also wanted to focus on the do-it-yourself writing tools specially designed for calligraphy in an urban context. While making this survey, in order to exchange with Chinese street calligraphers, given the fact that I wasn’t able to speak much Chinese, a communication based on drawing was the C:

only solution (along with the help of a questionnaire pre-translated into Chinese.) It was also necessary for me to demonstrate my capacity to understand a line, a stroke, or a gesture by showing my own calligraphic level in Latin letters—the only way to be accepted as a photographer amongst the different parks and clubs of ground letterers. Di Shu, like traditional calligraphy on paper, is above everything an introspective dialogue. Calligraphic practice corresponds to a research of self accomplishment or improvement, this improvement modifying our perception of the world. Even if the image of the text is a highly sophisticated object, calligraphy is

more a ritual thing and a lifestyle. The process of making is more important than the sign produced: a silent dialogue experiencing the subtle pleasure of discovering yourself through the movement of the brush and your own body. But here the practice is both individual and collective; I think we can talk of lettering in public space as socializing. Early morning parks are the stage of an essential moment of Chinese life where the need of the group, of sharing, expresses itself—most notably amongst elderly people but also young adults and kids.

January 2013

To watch Chastanet’s video documentary, visit http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9YrhDfI9lP8

unconventions unconventional

The different practitioners of ground calligraphy refer, first of all, to the fact of being together, meeting, making friends, not staying at home, and sharing moments in a nice environment surrounded by nature. Talking about literature, commenting on a gesture or a calligraphic detail—this seems to be more important than the inscription on the ground itself. But the quality of the calligraphic rendering nevertheless stays the central point of the debate. The elderly people ’s role of transmission is essential; some kids are trained by their parents or grandparents in this context. What is impressive in China is the fact that every pedestrian passing by (from the daily construction worker to the old grandmother coming back home after some early shopping) seeing a piece of ground water calligraphy is able to stop and discuss it with the street calligrapher. Endless debates about the form of a given sign can follow: dialogues that you can only hear in the occidental world between professional type designers or sign painters during specialists’ meetings. The ability to appreciate the sheer quality of a writing form is shared amongst millions of people. Bookshops propose a huge variety of epigraphic books explaining in detail the ductus of each sign and its

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evolution through history. These books are cheap, very popular, and not at all reserved for a scholars or elite designers. Such an enthusiasm for letterforms is refreshing for an observer, especially if he or she is interested in the field of graphic design and typography. H: What is your ultimate goal in chronicling this ephemeral street lettering?

Through the description I propose of the Di Shu phenomenon, the aim is to try to spread this practice outside of the boundaries of Chinese art of writing towards other writing cultures—specifically Latin-based ones. Ground calligraphy made with Chinese street-foam brushes is indeed possible in an occidental context: the possible link with latin calligraphy can be found in the stroke thick and thin contrast quality given by a Chinese foam street brush that is very close to the «expansion» contrast (related with the pressure applied to the writing tool), typical of many handwriting styles in the West. I gave several workshops where each participant is invited to create his own writing tool out of C:

salvaged materials (mainly foam and wooden sticks) and to make experiments in the streets or a public square following a latin lettering model optimized for street calligraphy based on the specific expansion contrast that Chinese street brush produce. These workshops, aimed to an audience of basic to advanced calligraphic level, is in an attempt to spread Di Shu Chinese handwritten practice in a global context. The idea is not, of course, to try to reproduce Chinese signs, but to translate in our own writing culture this capacity to invade public spaces through ephemeral waterbased lettering. It’s about trying rediscover the gestures of our own letters, to promote handwriting practices surviving outside of the keyboard world. Writing or

drawing by hand remains one of the most efficient education methods. The fact that this practice is urban, large-scale, and fun makes it a sexier way to sensitize people to our own calligraphic history. In addition, the urban context can provoke new formal solutions, such as the Pixação handstyle in São Paulo, Brazil, that I previously documented. The fact that Di Shu is water-based permits all experiments without restrictions or legal issues, and usually the reception by the pedestrian audiences is enthusiastic and friendly.

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A FLEX of

f rag i l i t y

Artist Mia Pearlmanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s colossal paper sculptures are a balance of delicacy and mass. story by Jacqueline Ruyak photographs by Jason Mandella & Gene Bahng

January 2013

Previous spread: Influx (detail), 2008, paper, India ink, tacks, and paper clips. Gyre, 2008, paper, India ink, tacks, and paper clips. Left and Middle: One is composed of two installations that face each other, both in opposition and interdependent of the other. Caught between these forces, viewers can only see one installation at a time, thus connecting them, and therefore making the work whole, in their minds.

Things sometimes just fall into place. For paper artist Mia Pearlman it all started, though, with some things falling out of place. In the summer of 2007, Pearlman and her husband, a video game producer, rented a house and studio in Woodstock. New York. Their first day there, she casually tacked some simple collages made of loose cut paper to a studio wall. The next morning she saw that they were falling away from the wall and bending forward three-dimensionally Into space. “Wow, that’s really interesting,” thought Pearlman, and within a week she created her first cut paper installation, Whorl, eight by ten by ten feet. A second, Tornado, soon followed. “It just went very, very quickly,” she says. 1 saw this thing and it kind of exploded. I was incredibly excited about this work and thought it could really go somewhere.” She was right. A first site-specific installation at the Boston Center for the Arts led to requests for more—eight in all within a year—in London, Geneva and New York. “It pretty much took off like wildfire,” said Pearlman speaking in her Brooklyn studio. “It was an incredibly exhausting, physically-decimating year, but it was amazing.” Pearlman creates her installations by sculpting swirling cut-paper drawings. With names like Gyre, Maelstrom, Eddy, Eye, and Updraft, each is a vortex of exploding energy where light and shadow play off each other. They start with intricate India ink line drawings, which Pearlman makes on large rolls of archival paper. With an X-Acto knife, she cuts negative space from each drawing, then layers

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the two-dimensional pieces, which are held together with white paper clips and tacks, to make ephemeral yet strong three-dimensional forms. Both drawing and cutting are, she says, very intuitive. “I try not to be too precious about it. It’s pretty much old-school, just me sitting here, listening to sports talk radio cutting paper.” One cut determines the next. Likewise, each installation is a process of trial and error. Planning things out beforehand would take all the fun out of making the work and doing the installation. A native New Yorker, Pearlman majored In painting at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, where she made interactive sculptures for her thesis. She says she always though of herself as a sculptor but for years did not make any three-dimensional works. When she saw those collages that gravity had pulled off the wall and into the room in Woodstock, she felt that her drawing and sculpture had finally grown together in unexpected but organic ways. In 2003 Pearlman started making Breath Paintings—buoyant, colorful works made by blowing bubbles or paint on paper. After being without a studio for a year and a half, she sat down at her desk and to her surprise, “out came all of those beautiful but ominous and scary black-and-white cloudscapes”—sublime, imaginary worlds devoid of humans. For years she switched between the Breath Paintings and time-consuming graphite cloudscapes, which she made by applying graphite in thin glazes with a paper-blending stick, never touching the paper directly with a pencil. These cloudscapes were the inspiration for the cut-paper works. Pearlman thinks her work is a lot about chance and control. Bubbles and clouds are both made of air and water; both are forms on the brink of being and not being. Clouds are visible and have immense destructive power but at the same time it’s almost as if they do not exist. “In the same way, we’d all like to preserve the illusion that we’re in control of our destiny but ultimately we’re not. How do you reconcile the

realization, post 9/11 or just while being alive that anything could ¬happen anytime, despite your best efforts? How do you still get out of bed every morning, when you know you could walk out on the street and get hit by a car and that’s that?” Pearlman had a large site-specific installation piece in the exhibition Slash: Per Under the Knife at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York (October 7, 2009-April 4, 2010). For the same show she also created a limited edition sculpture called Voluta to be for sale exclusively in the museum’s shop and online store. Made from translucent high-impact polystyrene, it comes flat but an ingenious (and simple) set of tabs and slots lets the buyer turn it into a threedimensional sculpture. Making Voluta meant learning laser-cutting, a technique Pearlman wanted to acquire in order to use more durable materials in her work and to relieve stress from manual cutting. Backed by a 2008 Polluck-Krasner Foundation grant, she studied laser-cutting last November at a residency at Proyecto ‘Ace, a printmaking center in Buenos Aires founded by Alicia Candiani. It was, says Pearlman, a “terrific program with people working at a high level.” Internet images of blood cells, jellyfish, nebulae, and other natural phenomena cover a wall in Pearlman’s studio. Though the natural world is her “main source of material,” she does not work from images. “Instead, I keep finding real images that are like the ones in my work,” she says. “I’m always being outsmarted by nature. I never win. Nature’s always cooler. Nature always does things that are just so wild, mind-boggling and unpredictable.”

Above: Paperstorms is a site-specific installation at two stores, Septieme Etage and Au Dela du Septieme Etage in Geneva. Bottom: Whorl, 2008, paper, India ink, monofilament

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Clockwise from right: Inrush, 2009, paper, India ink, tacks, and paper clips. The intricate cuts leave lots to clean up in the studio. Pearlman adds, “This is nothing!” The installation process always involves few ladders and assistants. Intuition is a large part of Pearlman’s work. She explains, “If I’m planning a show, sometimes I’ll put up the pieces in my studio to make sure I have enough for the final installation. I never fine-tune or place things purposely, because I want to keep the process at the gallery completely intuitive.”

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“After sitting at my desk all that time, the installation is so fun and spontaneous; This autumn Pearlman is making blown glass in residence at UrbanGlass in Brooklyn. it’s almost like dancing.” “I’ve never done anything like glass,” she says. “It’s a dream come true.” Blown glass connects with the Breath Paintings and Cloudscapes. The ambiguous nature of glass, a material with the molecular structure of a liquid and physical characteristics of a solid, is even more of a tie. “Everything I do captures this moment in time that is filled with ambiguity, where you don’t know if the thing you are looking at is contracting or expanding, coming together or growing apart. What’s happening in this world that I have a momentary glimpse into?” Everyone loves an architecture show about houses because all that is required of someone looking at a house is, as Gaston Bachelard writes in The Poetics of Space, “the ability to transcend our memories of all the houses in which we have found shelter [and] all the houses we have dreamed we live in” — beginning, of course, with the house we first lived in. Although visitors may appreciate the solo exhibition of a major architect, they are not usually as intimately involved in the thought processes behind the design of a concert hall, for example, and are likely to give up on reading detailed drawings. But presented with the plan of a house, people immediately walk through it in their imaginations. And architects’ models of houses spark, as doll houses do, a level of fantasy that makes it possible to experience the physical sensation of being in a new and yet familiar space. Also, house exhibitions are more about the future than they are about the past. When Barbara Jakobson (using the name B.J. Archer) staged “Houses for Sale” at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York in 1980, she invited eight

international architects to design private dwellings, showing the form to be fertile ground for architectural invention — “a geometric object of balanced voids and solids to be analyzed rationally,” as she wrote in the catalogue. Isozaki’s House of Nine Squares foretold his Palladian classicism, and Ambasz’s Arcadian Berm House spoke of that architect’s concern for the environment and interest in solar energy. In 1985, the winning designs on view at the Boston Architectural Center, from a Minneapolis College of Art and Design competition called “A New American House,” dealt with community life and the need for cluster housing that could provide work spaces at home as well as convenient child care. These houses, with backyards and gabled roofs, lent an aura of traditional reassurance to new social trends. This year, with “The Un-Private House,” the Museum of Modern Art is displaying 26 houses designed since 1988 — all but six of which have been or are being built. The show deals with new social patterns that call for fresh architectural solutions, in particular ones that combine working spaces with living spaces and that find a place for the virtual world in the home. Like a computer, the contemporary house concentrates, according to MoMA, on transmitting signals to the outside world at the cost of intimacy and privacy. Also, in a reversal of the norms of the “family room.” In the future Pearlman wants to make public art. An advocate for the function of art in society, she hopes that glass, like laser-cutting, will be a way to make works durable enough for installation in public spaces. –Jacqueline Ruyak is a writer based in Pennsylvania.

Above: Pearlman’s process starts with loose, intuitive drawings with India ink on large rolls of paper. Then she goes to work cutting out the white spaces between the drawn lines. She says that each cut determines the next one, which allows the process to remain free-form.

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THE BOLD AND THE BEAUTIFUL photographs by Adam Krause story by Mike Perry

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In a culture so obsessed with chaotic handprinted music and event posters, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s refreshing to see bold, geometric, and abstract screenprints from the personal portfolios of the top names in the printing world.

January 2013

GUITAR PARTS, 2008. Maya Hayuk Personal. Art print. 5 color. Edition of 30.

TONIGHT IS KINDA SPECIAL, 2009. Personal. Art print. 4 color. Edition of 45.

MAYA HAYUK

LANDLAND

Previous and current page: Maya Hayuk is a muralist, painter, photographer, and musician who maintains a studio in Brooklyn, New York. She has made album covers, posters, t-shirts, photographs, video, and stage sets. Her work has been exhibited and published internationally in galleries, museums, and in various printed and electronic media.

Opposite page: Landland is a very small graphic design and illustration studio in Minneapolis, Minnesota, started by Dan Black, Jessica Seamans, and the late Matt Zaun in the spring of 2007. The Landland studio doubles as a fully functional screen-printing shop, mainly focusing on record sleeves, posters, and art prints. They will soon start publishing some shortrun books and a handful of very limited-edition records.

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UNTITLED, 2009. Personal. Test print. Colors unknown. Edition of 1.

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ANDREW HOLDER Opposite page: Andrew Holder earned a bachelor of fine arts in illustration from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. He continues to live and work in Pasadena, where he illustrates for National Geographic, enRoute magazine, GOOD magazine, and many other clients.

MICHAEL COLEMAN Current page: Michael Coleman is a graphic designer and printmaker whose studio provides art direction and graphic design for clients such as Girl Skateboard Company, Fourstar Clothing Company, and Punk Planet magazine. Recently, Coleman launched Foundation Editions, a curatorial imprint dedicated to the advancement of serigraphy, which publishes and exhibits fine-art silk-screened prints for a roster of international printmakers and artists. His own serigraphs have been exhibited internationally.

Opposite: TWO BEARS REVISITED, 2009. Poster. 5 color. Edition of 25. Top: WALKER 01, 2009. Personal Serigraph. 4 color. Edition of 10. Bottom: WALKER 02, 2008. Personal Serigraph. 4 color. Edition of 10.

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HANNAH WALDRON Above: Hannah Waldron graduated from the University of Brighton in 2007 with a bachelor of arts in illustration. She has enjoyed working freelance on a variety of projects, while developing her own practice. The issue of reproductionis important to her, and she has been drawn to self-publishing through her interest in screen-printing and bookbinding processes.

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Top: COUNTERPART MAGAZINE ISSUE 2 (detail), 2008. Counterpart Magazine. Fold-up poster. 1 color. Edition of 500. Bottom: ALL ANIMALS LANDSCAPE (detail), 2007. Personal. Art print. 6 color. Edition of 50.

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“My motto has always been tradition plus innovation.” Holly Hollon, Birmingham native and freelance graphic designer and calligrapher, said this in response to a question about her thoughts on modern calligraphy. Having earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in graphic design from Auburn University, she first took copperplate calligraphy lessons when she was in college. She admits that her hand wasn’t perfect, but instead of becoming discouraged, she decided to embrace it. She said, “I took my imperfection and turned it into improvisation and created a more unique, whimsical, and modern version of copperplate. I still follow certain rules about how to form the letters and how to use the tools, but I have added my own twist, especially to the capitals.” What might have been considered imperfection by some has been viewed with great favor by the population of young women. This type of whimsical calligraphy offers a unique touch that nobody else has while maintaining an essence of tradition. When architecture enters the realm of museum display, it generally arrives small, smooth, and flat. Drawings, photographs, computer images, video, and scale models are the

usual media; however well they communicate information (and however beautiful they are), they can only approximate such phenomena as materiality, sound, and inhabitable space. For people not trained in the codes of architectural representation–most of the museum-going public–comprehension, too, tends to be approximate. In the last 15 years or so, installation architecture has come to offer an alternative: the construction within a gallery of temporary, full-scale architecture that creates spaces, programs, and experiences. The best of this work not only occupies but also affects its surroundings, exposing something of the conventions of museum and gallery display and revealing latent possibilities of the space it inhabits. “Fabrications,” a three-venue exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, uses installation to draw a diverse audience into a serious, immediate encounter with contemporary architecture. Organized by the three museums’ curators of architecture–Aaron Betsky, Mark Robbins, and Terence Riley, respectively–the show presents 12 in-

story by Henry Urbach photographs by Kelly Cummings & Jessica Wright January 2013

Hollon works on a variety of projects related to weddings. Some are more traditional like hand-addressed invitation envelopes. Others are more quirky like custom napkins and paper flags for her own wedding cake and hand-lettered blackboard menus for reception dinners.

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“I do love that weddings are molding and becoming more unique to a bride, but at the same time i love to hold onto tradition...who wants to look back at their wedding and think, ‘why did i do that?’” materials, “offer an immediate experience of architecture while revealing and addressing ideas about current architectural production, new materials, and making space.” Many of the pieces provide opportunities for direct physical contact; among the 12 projects you’re invited to sit, climb, hide, lay down, pull, and gently drop (while bemused museum guards do their best to remain impassive). Most also strive for immediacy by exposing or exaggerating their tectonic gestures, acting as a kind of large-print version for those not accustomed to reading architecture closely. But if the installations get the “immediate” experience right, they’re not all as successful at dealing with the capacity of architecture to mediate: fewer than half of the projects present themselves as devices for reinterpreting and rearranging architectural space. It’s hard to know why this is; maybe it’s because most of the architects in the show are more used to building big than thinking about museum installation. But why fabricate an interesting architectural object for a show without also making an interesting claim about its setting, about the institutional and spatial conditions of its display?

Across the three venues–the sculpture garden at MOMA and the galleries of the Wexner and SFMOMA–three basic strategies are used to make the installations “immediate”; they might be called mimetic, interactive, and interventionist approaches, and the projects divide up neatly into four per category. The mimetic works present small if nonetheless full-scale buildings or building parts that take a fairly uncritical stance to the constraints of museum display. Patkau Architects’ Petite Maison de Weekend, revisited, at the beautifully installed Wexner site, is a complete wooden cottage for two. Well crafted, if didactic in its demonstration of “sustainable” construction, it presents such features as a deep storage wall, photovoltaic roof, composting toilet, and rain-collection system; after the exhibition, it is meant to be relocated and to serve as a prototype for other such houses. Mockbee/Coker Architects followed a similar strategy, also at the Wexner: the firm built a passagewaycum-porch of different woods, cables, window screen, cast concrete, tree stumps, blue glass bottles, and other materials drawn from the vernacular architecture of the rural South; it will be attached to a home in Alabama after the exhibition

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â&#x20AC;&#x153;I took my imperfection and turned it into improvisation and created a more unique whimsical and modern version of copperplate.â&#x20AC;?

Clockwise from top left: Holly designed and illustrated the branding for a stationary boutique in Birmingham called Scribbler. Holly works in her makeshift studio (aka her dining room table) with her illustration and water color supplies. Her calligraphy designs have expanded to not only include the typical invitations, but also full wedding suites and illustrations.

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ends. Given these architects’ interest in reusing their objects elsewhere, it’s not surprising that the installations remain aloof from the museum. The Somatic Body, Kennedy & Violich Architecture’s installation at SFMOMA (where each of the show’s architects worked on each of its pieces at a different stage; the architect or firm that produced final working drawings for a piece is identified here as its author), presents a wall in the process of delamination and eruption, a tumbling swell of gypsum board, plywood, lath, and wire. Positioned near the entry, it has an interesting annunciatory presence but misses the chance to reorganize passage into the gallery; worse, the pseudo-sculptural stacks of drywall end up offering a banal display of common building materials. At MOMA, Munkenbeck + Marshall Architects built a structure that recalls Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona pavilion above the garden’s reflecting pool. In a setting so infused with the spirit of Mies (the garden was designed, after the master, by Philip Johnson), this little hut intelligently and ironically captures his aesthetic in condensed form, and brings an intimate architectural scale into the garden, but otherwise doesn’t do much apart from showcasing two gorgeous hanging panels of woven steel. The four interactive installations focus on the demonstration of physical forces. With Dancing Bleachers, Eric Owen Moss draped wishbone-like pieces of steel over the Wexner Center’s beams; these gigantic, limp-looking forms were originally meant to be climbed so people could reach viewing platforms some 20 feet above the gallery, but institutional anxieties prevailed, and the hands-on elements (treads and rails) are vestigial. Still, the piece has an undeniably exciting presence and carries muscle enough to confront the idiosyncratic spaces and ornamental structure of Peter Eisenman’s architecture.

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From top to bottom: Invitations for Holly’s own bridal tea reflect her philosophy of innovative tradition with the mix of a centered composition and serif type with playful calligraphy and illustration. Whimsical borders and calligraphy in vibrant colors on food label cards help to dress up a wedding buffet.

Two SFMOMA installations practically insist on physical interaction, but don’t go far enough in uncovering what Betsky, in his curatorial statement, rightly calls the museum’s “protective skin”–the ways it relies on its apparent physical “neutrality” (white walls, silence, concealed building and security systems, and so on) to veil its own interpretive practices and modes of spatial control. The Body in Action, by Hodgetts + Fung Design Associates, gathers air from the museum’s ventilation system into an enormous sailcloth “lung” that feeds into a bowed wooden mouthpiece; handles invite visitors to open the mouth and feel the rush of air. The Body in Equipoise, by Rob Wellington Quigley, is a kind of gangplank made of wood, cables, pink stretch wrap, bungee cord, steel tubes, and other materials; as people walk along its surface, they reach a point where their weight causes the floor to slightly drop. Both pieces subvert our expectations of architectural surfaces, but fail to get at the political dimension that Betsky suggests. At MOMA, Ten Arquitectos with Guy Nordenson removed a portion of the venerable garden’s marble paving and inserted a wooden ramp/seat assembly in the rubble facing Auguste Rodin’s Monument to Balzac. Visitors descend through the ground plane, sit in the chair, and look up to a lean, cantilevered glass canopy inscribed with an unidentified fragment of art historical writing. The reference is so obscure, and its presentation so indirect, that you can’t tell if it has been invoked ironically, respectfully, or gratuitously; meanwhile, the power and immediacy of the excavation gets undermined. It is the four interventionist installations that pose genuinely interesting arguments about conditions of architectural exhibition and museum display along with more “immediate” aspects of construction and experience. At MOMA, Office dA erected a stair-like structure of perforated, folded sheet steel that leaps, from stiletto feet, beyond the garden’s northern wall, suggesting the interpenetration of museum garden and urban fabric. Despite the fact that–among the Judds and Giacomettis–it risks misreading as a none-toohandsome sculpture, it nonetheless makes a strong urban gesture, both within the garden and when seen from street.

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Along part of the glass curtain wall on the opposite side of the garden, Smith-Miller + Hawkinson constructed a quiet but pointed critique of the wall’s way of framing and separating garden and museum. Among other elements, a folded plane of plywood steps up from the garden floor, meets the glass, and then continues inside, effectively bringing the outdoors in. Also outside, a large black panel attached to steel columns blocks the garden view and reinforces the windows’ mirror effect. Reflected images and abstract forms crisscross the glass boundary, entangling viewer and viewed in a nuanced spectral play. The other interventionist projects actually introduce new programs, and both would make welcome permanent museum installations. Ensemble of clear acrylic benches, reading lecterns, shelves, and horizontal planes suspended from cables. The work not only adds architectural definition with subtle optical and acoustic effects, but also offers people the chance to sit and read–a rare accommodation in museum galleries. To the extent that “Fabrications” can legitimize and promote installation as a form of architectural practice, it marks a significant moment in the development of contemporary architecture. The show demonstrates a broad range of innovative formal strategies and materials while, at its best, showing us–even the novices among us–something of how architecture can change our relationship to the world. Despite the uneven results of the first experiment, an ongoing, periodic forum conceived along these lines could move inventive architectural thinking beyond the design. –Henry Urbach writes about design from New York.

â&#x20AC;&#x153;You can not recreate it on the computer, the hand is what makes it so beautiful.â&#x20AC;? January 2013

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January 2013

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