A week ago I was in Ithaca, New York, mounting the first exhibition of my photography. This exhibition, Pacing Space, was a collaboration with a former grad school classmate of mine, Juliette Dubroca, in association with Damien Faure, a French filmmaker. Pacing Space is on display from May 18 - May 28 in Milstein Hall's Bibliowicz Gallery within the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning at Cornell University.
I have divided this topic into two posts: the first on the exhibition, the second on the photographs therein. Stepping toward the architecture from the exhibition feels like an appropriate way to mirror an architecture that carefully controls spatial relations and creates a highly mediated relationship between the interior and exterior.
Thus we begin with photographs of a carefully curated exhibition of images and representations of houses, which themselves selectively engage with and frame their context. So many layers to peel!
The text below comes from the introduction to our exhibition.
Pacing Space is an exploration in drawing, photography, and film of unique threshold conditions present in contemporary Japanese housing.
The houses featured in this exhibition display characteristic ambiguities regarding transitions from public to private. Rather than a binary in or out, boundaries seem blurred, programs juxtaposed, views layered, and spatial sequences choreographed. In dense urban Tokyo the effect maximizes a sense of space on small, constricted sites; in more suburban Himeji it continually reinforces a dialogue between the historic castle town and modern dwelling. In both cases, these ingenious manipulations engender zones of shifting occupancy and thereby generate ways to economize on area without sacrificing space.
We see a relevance to contemporary issues of sustainability in how these Japanese architects manage to produce a heightened sense of space with limited means. With growing and urbanizing populations, rising standards of living, and increasingly scarce resources, this urban Japanese model appears to offer an alternative to the frequently exported suburban American model of McMansions sprawling beyond the horizon.