“Nothing to Fear” Facade

Recently we were commissioned to do a design-build facade installation for Peter G.-Ray’s 2009 ‘Nothing to Fear’ painting exhibition at the Bridge Gallery on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Two years earlier we debuted his work in the U.S. at AxD Gallery with a solo show entitled ‘CUT’. For that exhibition we built rolled aluminum panels on the exterior of our gallery, creating the appearance of their being cut and peeled away.

Views of finished window at Bridge Gallery, and the painting "Cut" by Peter G.-Ray, displaying similarly hand-rolled aluminum panels.

The designs for both gallery fronts flowed as fairly direct extensions of the artist’s interests in concealing, cutting, peeling and revealing. In his work, openings, whether rendered physically in cut materials or graphically with painted surfaces, are invitations for engagement. Simply put, Peter’s work invites curiosity. As art critic Ken Moffett has noted: “G.-Ray has combined the hallucinatory surrealism of Dali with the vigor and freedom of Jackson Pollock, metamorphosing these into something startlingly new. He hungers to unite extremes: Precision and free improvisation, the intensely graphic and beautifully painted, exquisite refinement of detail and pictorial force.” All in all, there is plenty in Peter G.-Ray’s work to sustain interest and wonder.

Our design-build exercises to date have all been conducted as “charrettes” of a week or less. In the case of the Bridge Gallery façade installation we had the added constraint of performing all of the work in a single day, including round trip transportation from Philadelphia, with materials and equipment fitting inside a mid-sized sedan.

Fortunately working conditions were absolutely perfect. The weather was very mild for late February. The trickiest part of the project was securing our work to the Bridge Gallery without permanently altering the existing marble façade. We accomplished this by working the head and a jamb of our frame into existing security gate hardware and bolting the base into the concrete sidewalk. Interest in our installation piece increased dramatically as the first aluminum panels were screwed onto the frame. (See “before” and installation photos below.)

Neighboring shop owners, tourists and random passersby stopped to ask us what was going on. We handed out quite a few postcards for Nothing to Fear during that Spring-like afternoon. As we finished up at dusk, Peter G.-Ray was quite pleased with results … the debut for both of us in NYC. Two days later, it snowed at the March 1st opening reception!

www.bridgegalleryny.com

Diversity in Practice

One of the touchstones at Always by Design (AxD) has been seeking diversity as a means of nurturing inquiry and growth, both personally and professionally. This flies in the face of “standard practice” which encourages market focus and specialization. Indeed, as we’re discovering, diversity certainly isn’t an easy concept to “brand”. Maybe it’s just luck, but on the architectural practice side, our practice has achieved a diversity of clients and project types beyond anything we had anticipated. In this past year alone we have worked on restaurants, a library, an auditorium, government offices, a church, a boutique salon, industrial infrastructure, and several residences.

While, on the art gallery side of AxD, the ability to select artists and artwork is wholly within our control, it’s still gratifying to look back and see the range of artists represented and artwork we’ve shown thus far. Media has included various forms of drawing, printmaking, painting, photography, collage, and sculpture. Subject matter has encompassed non-representational imagery, abstractions, landscapes, portraiture, details of nature, sci-fi and fantasy imagery, and gay erotica.

A selection of art exhibited at AxD

We’re confident that the lineup of artists we’ve scheduled for 2009 will continue our commitment to artistic diversity. Similarly, with our architectural practice on the verge of signing an agreement with a major hotelier, we’re looking to welcoming in the new year further diversifying our clientele as well.

Ed Barnhart, AIA

The Proposal

Joy and insights sometime come in very unexpected and mysterious ways. When we established the art gallery we knew we wanted it to be more about offering a place for social engagement and quiet reflection than being a place of commerce. The gallery has been the site of lectures, readings, receptions, parties, workshops, community meetings and a multitude of musical and theatrical performances. Nonetheless, it came as a complete surprise recently when a neighbor called to see if he could use the gallery to propose to his future bride. WOW! Who could ask for a better compliment? (More importantly, she said ‘yes’. Whew.)

Moshin Ali proposing and Khadijeh Zarafshar accepting (with painting in background)

“Why in a gallery?” I asked (future groom) Mohsin Ali on the eve of his proposal. It turned out that Mohsin had made an oil painting (entitled “The Proposal”) especially for his fiancée, Khadijeh Zarafshar. The work calls to mind both Indian miniatures and Japanese woodcuts. Mohsin and Khadijeh are depicted in the foreground, dwarfed by a lush green mountainscape and luminous magenta-lavender sky. It betrays an immense optimism amidst an uncertain larger landscape. After Khadijeh accepted the ring, all I saw was the radiating optimism. Somehow I suspect the gallery will be a bit too small for their wedding. We wish you both the best!

[Proposal of 15 Nov. '08 - Ed Barnhart]

Art + Architecture

When we relocated in order to expand our architectural studio, we started AxD Gallery as an exhibition venue for contemporary visual arts. The most frequent question since its opening in January 2007 has been: What’s the connection between the architectural studio and the art gallery? The answer involves a constellation of reasons. Obviously we find a significant overlap between the visual arts and the aesthetic issues that architects and designers face daily. As such, the gallery represents and functions for us as an incubation laboratory for ideas and inspirations. Secondly, we see the gallery as a form of social activism, supporting the arts and bringing community together. And finally, it’s awfully fun to host a reception party once a month and catch up with friends!

The art of any era can provide inspiration for us as designers. Constructivism, Futurism, Abstract Expressionism, Op Art, Minimalism and patterns of various tribal “folk arts” have all been frequently been mined by architects for ideas. Japanese woodblock prints served as a great inspiration to Frank Lloyd Wright. The Pictures at an Exhibition concerto by Modest Petrovich Mussorgsky is an obvious example of an artist seeking to transpose a visual experience to a musical one. When we began the Gallery we were thinking exclusively of visual artists, but obviously all art forms influence each other. Consequently, since our opening we have expanded to intermittently include various performing arts – both musical and theatrical as well.

In our own work we have looked to artists such as Sean Scully, Ellsworth Kelly and Agnes Martin for inspiration. For the interior of our gallery we chose to differentiate “service elements” (i.e. restroom and a stair) as abstract objects ‘carved’ out of the whiteness of the gallery. These elements were clad with Douglas Fir wood panels. The panel pattern was inspired by the painting Cite’ by Ellsworth Kelly, which ironically was itself inspired by oblique shadows cast from an architectural feature – a fire escape.

As I am writing this, AxD Gallery is featuring the work of Deborah Sawyer. Her work encompasses a variety of media, including oil paints, charcoal, gouache, found objects, glass, vinyl, rubber and various types of metal – cast, forged and welded. For this body of work, her inspirations come largely from the rusting decay of discarded automobiles. Sculptural pieces include functional furniture, various bowels and containers. Paintings and drawn works evoke a range of emotions, from quiet serenity to foreboding tension or remorse. Her work reminds us that even the detritus of our very existence can be an inspiration.

We’re looking forward to learning and sharing the back-and-forth of how architecture, visual, and performing arts shape and transform one another.

Ed Barnhart, AIA