Maryhill Double

Site-specific installation at Columbia Gorge – Summer 2006

Funded by Creative Capital Foundation

In 1914 an eccentric railroad land baron began construction on a concrete Georgian Style mansion overlooking a remote portion of the Columbia river in Washington state.  His vision for a Quaker community around his house and 6,000 acres of arid ranch property was never realized before his death.  However, the Museum opened in 1940, 9 years after his death with one of the largest collections of Rodin sculptures.

This site-specific installation created a ghost double of the interior architectural volume of the original museum, across the Columbia river Gorge into Oregon.  The new structure is fabricated with ordinary scaffolding and blue construction netting.  Viewers were able to experience the piece in isolation, ascend the stairway and circumnavigate the exterior at their will, without direction or oversight.  This work stood along the basalt cliffs, staring back at its double, for a three months during the windswept months of summer.

Linear Plenum – February 2004

Suyama Space, curated by Beth Sellars

This is a warehouse scaled site-specific installation made with 100 miles of nylon masonry line.  19,000 individually vertical strands ranging from 4 – 22 feet long are placed at approximately three inches apart throughout.  The work is a direct response to the spatial and architectural qualities inherent in the former industrial building that translucently displaces the atmospheric volume.  Within the overall field of lines, several discrete geometric subtractions were cut away that dialogue with the architectural gestures within the space.  An additional gesture of green aniline dye was used as a chromatic core sample linking two large openings on each end of the rectangular volume.

No instructions were given to direct viewers through the piece.  This required viewers to make a conscious decision on whether or not to physically enter the piece.  Those that did plunge into the frictionless lines were treated to a total disorientation of the senses.  Understanding this piece required physical circumnavigation through the work.

150 Works of Art – September 2005 - February 2006

Henry Art Gallery – University of Washington

Elizabeth Brown, the chief curator for contemporary art invited Lead Pencil Studio to produce an installation proposal for a biennially occurring exhibition drawn from the permanent collection.

Their approach placed the work on identical stands and ordered the work chronologically within the gallery.  Viewers approached the work from the back, with only the barest information given in black stenciled plywood;  last name, date, title and identifying tag.

The singularity of each work and the anthropomorphic nature of each stand imparted an intimacy to the viewing process.  As viewers worked their way from the oldest work to the most recent, the memory of each piece grew both physically and mentally distant.

Inversion I -  August 2002

Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle

A walk down the street can sometimes reveal a thickness in the air packed with fleeting particles, currents, vectors, lines of site and transient objects. This phenomenon has an atmospheric density that terminates or is deflected by stationary solids such as buildings.

Inversion I is an expression of this condition and questions the solid nature of the building envelope, the hierarchy of interior / exterior, the clarity of solid / void.  Specifically, this piece is a study of the void-form from a light manufacturing building inverted from its more common representation as an architectural solid.

Minus Space – August – November 2005

Henry Art Gallery – Faye G. Allen Center for the Arts

This installation forcefully exhumes the unique social and site conditions of an otherwise neutral contemporary art museum space in Seattle.

The museum is sited on a prominent location that serves as the main pedestrian campus entry.  The 100-year history of campus planning and construction has made the site unrecognizable from its origins as an ancestral forest.  In an effort to resurrect the memory of the site topography, the original grade of the site is re-introduced into the gallery space by means of geo-textile erosion control fabric and site survey markers.  A hole is introduced in this membrane to suggest a conduit between the world above-grade and another below.

As visitors descend the museum stair they are confronted with two large rectangular forms floating in mid-air and made from a featherweight plastic material that drifts along with the museum mechanical air currents.  These forms suggest built structures that have lost their utility and drift aimlessly in search of a function.

Seattle Staircase – August 2003

Sand Point Arts and Cultural Exchange

One half of Seattle Staircase is an architectural graft onto a defunct firehouse and the other half is an incomplete growth sprouting from the retaining wall of a building that burned long ago.  The site is at the Sand Point Naval Base along the shore of Lake Washington.  There is a gesture, point [a] offering a modest beginning and a conclusion, point [b] which retains the quality of being physically inaccessible.

75 feet overall length

Made of one mile of 11ga wire

Duration:  1 month

Non Sign – October 2004

Emily Carr Institute of Art, Vancouver BC

The billboards that pepper the consumer landscape offer a structural interest apart from their function as an elevated advertisement.

Borrowing from the structural invention of the columnar pipe footing, this architectural construction if both non-space and non-sign.  Surfaces ordinarily associated with large-format ads are left blank and the void space between plates is reconstructed as a dwellable space but remains inaccessible.  This introduces the idea of the commodity of architecture and the culture of goods that have no function in the practical world.