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After receiving my degree in architecture in 1972 I steered away from architectural practice in order to research architectural issues in a laboratory-like setting. I make buildings, furniture, vessels and utensils as backdrops and props for everyday, ordinary human activity. These isolate, elevate and monumentalize eating, sleeping and bathing, turning life into theater. My work includes sculpture, furniture, public installations and architecture. The work becomes mechanisms that activate ritual, ceremony and movement. |
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Allan Wexler
After receiving my degree in architecture in 1972 I steered away from architectural practice in order to research architectural issues in a laboratory-like setting.
I make buildings, furniture, vessels and utensils as backdrops and props for everyday, ordinary human activity. These isolate, elevate and monumentalize eating, sleeping and bathing, turning life into theater. My work includes sculpture, furniture, public installations and architecture. The work becomes mechanisms that activate ritual, ceremony and movement.
The designer attempts to problem solve but his first challenge is to reveal the problem, to get excited about the problem, to manipulate the problem, to play with the problem and to see the problem as the plastic media and content. It is when I am far into my visual investigations that new and interesting problems emerge, those that are the least obvious. It is for this reason that I often like to work without a goal in sight. I spent a year exploring the table as object and function before intriguing and unexpected issues appeared: the forced arrangement of a community of diners, the effects of un-level surfaces and gravity, the relationship of the table surface to the ground and to the sky above.
It is by dissolving the boundaries between the fine arts and the applied arts, between furniture design, architecture and theatrical performance, between sculpture and interactive exhibition design and between the practice and the research of architecture, that new ideas and innovation flourishes. I am an architect in an artist’s body.
Too Large Wall / Gracie is simultaneously a collection, a billboard, storage, sculpture, furniture, installation and architecture. It questions what is functional and what is art, what is beautiful and what can be beautiful if we ever so slightly shift our vision.
A skewed wall interrupts the Museum. Too large for this space, it pierces through the Museum’s side. The energy of the art museum cannot be contained and it bursts out into the public parking lot. The orange color is a warning. Enter at your own risk. An art museum is a place of confrontation where the expected and the comfortable collide with the unexpected and the uncomfortable.
The industrial shelving is a cabinet of wonder. The Museum’s garage, basement and attic are on display. The Museum’s back room storage is brought forward. The shelving is a framework that catalogs and orders confusion and energy. The opacity, translucency and transparency of the wall is controlled by the choice, organization and quantity of the objects stored on the shelves. Everyday objects become precious objects, a collage of Duchampian “ready-mades.” The museum’s back storage is now its front entrance.
The shelving unit is a framework that catalogs and orders confusion and energy. It contains boxes, tools, water jugs, reams of paper, wine bottles and files.
