ARUP Advanced Geometry Unit: h-edge
September 14 to October 28, 2006
Opening Reception: September 14, 6-8PM
ARTISTS SPACE
38 Greene Street, 3rd Floor
New York, NY 10013
T 212 226 3970
F 212 966 1434
artspace@artistsspace.org
www.artistsspace.org
This fall, Artists Space presents h-edge, a new project created by Cecil Balmond and ARUP Advanced Geometry Unit, a think tank dedicated to researching complex structural geometry in support of new architectural visions and solutions. AGUs installation at Artists Space will function as an enclosure within the gallery, allowing visitors the opportunity to experience, interact with, and compartmentalize physical space in new and exciting ways. h-edge is an experiment in the use of geometry and matter to create organizations of space. h-edge traverses the boundaries of mathematics, art, architecture and engineering, exploring new opportunities of complexity.
The project exists on three levels: the mathematical-geometric, the architectural-spatial and the structural-tectonic. h-edge is based on a cubic fractal tiling of space known as the Menger Sponge. The geometric matrix of this sponge is modular and self-similar offering positive and negative space at embedded scales. This binary tiling is deployed at three different scales, which create spatial conditions that relate to the scale of the human body. These are named cave, trench, and path
.
Tectonically, the tiling is achieved through the use of two modular units: the leaf and the chain-link, which interlock to form a suspended network of reciprocal load-paths. The staggering of the plates along the chain in four directions ensures that no plate touches another and that the chain is pre-stressed to form a rigid load-path. h-edge and the Fourier Carpet are binary systems describable as ordered series of 0 and 1 digits in three- and two-dimensional mathematical space. They both demonstrate how number systems can be used to describe, control and inform geometric complexity.
h-edge has been designed by the ARUP Advanced Geometry Unit in London, and constructed in Philadelphia with the help of Penn Design students. It consists of 5200 laser-cut aluminum plates and almost 5000ft of stainless steel chain. The Fourier Carpet has been digitally generated and designed by Jenny E. Sabin in Philadelphia and woven on a digitized Jacquard Loom by Keystone Weaving in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. It is 36ft by 5ft and is composed of interlaced black and white wool threads.
Design Team: Cecil Balmond, Charles Walker, Francis Archer, Daniel Bosia, Jenny E. Sabin
Assembly Team: Jenny E. Sabin and PennDesign Students
Curated by Christian Rattemeyer
h-edge is supported, in part, by ARUP, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Elise Jaffe Jeffrey Brown, and PennDesign.
Jordan Kantor: Recent Paintings
Jordan Kantor produces large-scale paintings of recent media representations as a means to address the role of images in our experience of the physical world. In them, trauma, death, beauty, and history collide as private thoughts and public spectacles are reprocessed through paint. His paintings depict bodies that have been emptied of their gravity, tactility, and smell in the flat, dimensionless space of news photography, bestowed with new pictorial physicality. Painted, the life-sized bodies refuse the fate of the diminutive photographs on which they are based: to be ignored, folded-over, and thrown away with yesterdays papers.
Mark Hamilton: Echoplex
September 14 to October 28 2006
Mark Hamiltons interest to understand the roles of (visual) objects in the aesthetic economies of culture as markers of value, but also as markers of the borders between the inside and the outside of culture is at the core of his practice. For Echoplex, Hamilton strategically employs a minimal range of signs to maximum effect by drawing on carefully selected stock images and formal solutions of withdrawal, critique, and discontent.
