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(Un)Building
Curated by Dina Deitsch
Featuring Emily Kiersten Ambs, Samantha Fields, Emily Katrencik, Sally Moore, Kirsten Reynolds, Joel Ross, Christopher Wawrinofsky
 How can we respond to architecture? It gives us shelter and literally defines our daily lives: we eat, sleep, work, walk, and live where it tells, or rather, lets us. In turn, we lovingly decorate and care for our spaces. We imbue them with deeply personal and metaphorical meaning that at times can border on the fetishistic. On a broader scale, architectural debate is as loud as ever in the public arena. Redevelopment projects, bubbling real estate markets, memorials, even terrorism, and of course, Boston’s own infamous urban reconstruction--the Big Dig--have all brought building and un-building into the fore. Our built environment ultimately reflects, reinforces and even establishes the values of a society, but how can we explore this enormous and complicated relationship?
(un)Building presents seven artists – Emily Kiersten Ambs, Samantha Fields, Emily Katrencik, Kirsten Reynolds, Joel Ross, Sally Moore, and Christopher Wawrinofsky — who investigate our relationship to architecture by literally and conceptually deconstructing it. The materiality of building - beams, nails, walls, floors, models and even architects themselves - is exposed and transformed as a means to conceptually unearth the implications of architecture. In doing so, each artist re-presents building through video, sculpture and photography as a complex site of social, historical, economic, political, and symbolic construction.
“Unbuilding” was also the term the artist Gordon Matta-Clark (1943 – 1978) used to describe his “building cuts”: sculptural conversions of abandoned buildings produced by dismantling architectural sites. Yet his reuse of buildings was a reaction to and made possible by a particular moment in the 1970s in which urban decay prompted the widespread abandonment of factories and buildings across the country. In our current hyperactive state of urban renewal, this seems like an impossibly distant, even quaint, past. There is hardly a factory left in New England that has not been converted into luxury lofts, nor a city in America with out a “starchitect” building in the works. On a national scale, terrorism has propelled the symbolism of buildings (and their vulnerability) into yet another realm of our collective awareness. In a post-9/11 society, a skyscraper can no longer just be a skyscraper.
Therefore, when we speak of “unbuilding” today, as opposed to 30 years ago, we are speaking of a new endeavor defined by our current economic and political climate, one that, unfortunately, is also fraught with anxiety and fear. Humor, like a nervous giggle, seems an appropriate response, as does fantasy, personal experience, language, memory and history. The artists in (un)Building use these tools, sometimes even with the chainsaw, to acknowledge how implicated architecture is in our lived experience.
Opening Reception: Friday, June 8, 6 - 8 pm
Gallery Talk with Curator Dina Deitsch and Joel Ross, Samantha Fields, Sally Moore and Christopher Wawrinofsky: Saturday, June 9, 2 pm
Pictured, from top: Emily Katrencik, Consuming 1.956 inches3 each day for forty-one days, 2005, Video, performed at LMACK Project, Brooklyn, NY
Sally Moore, Drop-Off, wood, paint and wire, 32" x 7" x 16", image courtesy Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston
Kirsten Reynolds, Excerpt from the 24B Probability Series, digital photograph, archival pigmented ink, 16 1/2" x 11"
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