Featured Artist

 

Alex Schweder

 
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Evaporative Buildings, 2009
Video projection, stage snow, mist
10 x 15 x 10 feet, 30 minute DVD loop
  Evaporative Buildings detail
Description

Animated architectural imagery is projected on both machine made snow and sprinkler mist in two separate
but related locations to produce architectural space that exists for only a moment.

 
Snowballing Doorway, 2008
Vinyl, fan blown air
15 feet x 13 feet 9 inches x 10 feet

Description

Two arches of the same size pass air back and forth all day long. Viewers can pass through the bottom arch
until it becomes volatile and the upper up-side-down arch starts to displace it.

 

A Sac of Rooms Three Times a Day, 2007
Vinyl, fan blown air
Video of installation
21 x 9 x 28 feet

 

 

 

Description

A Sac of Rooms Three Times a Day is the third work in series I call Edifice Events. This body of work understands buildings as very slow performances; each installation accelerates the time in which flux is perceptible in out built environment. Edifice Events encourage their viewers to see space that changes within a timeframe closely related to that of our bodies. By doing so, a reading of the relationship between occupying bodies and occupied space as permeable rather than discrete is suggested.

As indicated in the adjacent floor plans, A Sac of Rooms Three Times a Day stuffs the first floor rooms of an 800 square foot house into a building envelope of a 500 square foot bungalow. The red lines in the adjacent drawings indicate the origional outlines of the 5 clear vinyl forms in this installation. Through this misfit, an architectural space results with deformations, writhings nad contortions as the rooms inflate and readjust to their volatile adjacencies. Although the timed “score” of fans turning on and off remains the same for every performance, the material and architectural result of the vinyl sacks is different each time that the rooms fall upon one another in different configurations during the deflations.

In addition to examining the relationship of the individual components of a whole to one another, this work sees the relationship between architecture and landscape to be one of time as well as space. Commonly, buildings are perceived as objects that sit stably upon a site. A Sac of Rooms Three Times a Day, whether a viewer sees a landscape or a building no only depends on where they look, but also when.

 

 

Peescapes, 2001
Vitreous china
Male: 32 x 18 x 14 inches edition 2/3
Female: 32 x 18 x 16 inches edition 3/3

Male detail
   
Description

Peescapes view the removal of our bodily waste as a poetic opportunity. Each pair of urinals consists of one male and one female urinal. These diptychs use terms commonly associated with the choreography of water such as a fountain, dam, and aqueduct to sensualize urine as it flows to the drain. These terms are used to inform alterations to the interior landscapes of urinals to aesthetisize rather than economize the removal of pee.