For this site-specific installation, I considered PS1’s history as a public school turned exhibition space. I focused on the architectural changes made to alter its institutional status, which involved the removal and construction of internal walls. I built two earthen columns of the same proportions as those hidden in the building’s walls. My columns, made of Miracle-Gro potting mix purchased at a local hardware store, did not reach the ceiling—they ended about two inches short. The logic of site-specific architectural intervention was inverted so that my non-supporting columns were in fact nothing more, and nothing less, than sculptures.
The installation was accompanied by the third iteration of Structural, Uncontrolled, Hollywood, Political, Auteur, Cosmic, Happy, Sad, and Ordinary, in which the illuminated field projected by a 16mm film projector running without film was painted out to compensate for the difference between the projection and the ambient light of the gallery.
The (Not)Architecture projects use an adaptation of ancient building methods that have recently been used as alternative ‘green’ building practices in which earth is packed into forms. When left un-plastered, objects built using this method recall geological or archeological strata. What is in fact seen in these strata, however, is a record of the production of the work and how it changes as the material – commercially available potting soil – dries, hardens and cracks over the course of an exhibit.
