BUST August 22nd, 2015
UCLA ARTS BLOG
Click to read about BUST in Architect’s Newspaper Blog
Come join us for the Opening Reception for BUST, a group exhibition,
on Saturday, August 29th, 2015; 7-11pm
Guest-curated by
William O’Brien Jr.
Featuring works by:
Andrew Kovacs, Bureau Spectacular, CODA, First Office, MILLIØNS, MOS, Norman Kelley, Pita + Bloom, PARA Project, SO-IL, & WOJR
Saturday, August 29th, 2015; 7-11pm
***Opening Reception Photos taken by Eric Minh Swenson***
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PRESS RELEASE
Jai & Jai Gallery is proud to present the group exhibition, BUST, guest curated by William O’Brien Jr., Principal of WOJR, Co-Founder of Collective–LOK, and Associate Professor in the MIT Department of Architecture.
Featuring works by Andrew Kovacs, Bureau Spectacular (Jimenez Lai), CODA (Caroline O’Donnell), First Office (Anna Neimark + Andrew Atwood), MILLIØNS (John May + Zeina Koreitem), MOS Architects (Hilary Sample + Michael Meredith), Norman Kelley (Carrie Norman + Thomas Kelley) , PARA Project (Jon Lott), Pita + Bloom (Florencia Pita + Jackilin Hah Bloom), SO-IL (Florian Idenburg + Jing Liu), and WOJR (William O’Brien Jr.)
BUST brings together eleven established architects and firms to reconsider the relevance of a seemingly anachronous means of evaluation for a work of architecture: the façade.
The exhibition displays a spectrum of leanings on the role of characteristics associated with the traditional façade such as frontality, proportionality, anthropomorphism, zoomorphism, figuration, and symmetry within contemporary architecture and art. The distinct attitudes of these eleven architecture firms in regards to these formal tendencies is demonstrated through the design and making of a series of eleven busts.
As a formal and historical precedent, the bust provides a charged framework that acts as a register to compare and contrast form-making agendas. In this context, an abstraction of a bust can be seen as a proto-architectural object that arrives in a non-neutral state, one with preexisting biases about orientation and hierarchy within the realm of contemporary art and architecture. With each bust, the exhibitors articulate their positions and their interpretations by the ways in which they reaffirm, undermine, or disregard such conditions. Because a bust is traditionally articulated through a subtractive process rather than an assembled construct, the various alternative methods employed by each exhibitor in the production of their bust suggests more general positions regarding architectural form.
In a broader context, the spectrum of invited architects/artists will exhibit a wide breadth of representation and fabrication techniques that is currently permeating the trans-disciplinary discourse of art and architecture through the inspiration of the classical bust.
RELATED EVENTS
Saturday, August 29, 2015: PRESS PREVIEW; 1pm – 6pm
Saturday, September 19, 2015 @ 7pm, “BUST – A Conversation.”
Date TBA – BUST Publication
ABOUT THE GUEST-CURATOR WOJR (William O’Brien Jr.)
William O’Brien Jr., principal of WOJR: Organization for Architecture, is an Associate Professor in the MIT Department of Architecture and one of the founding members of Collective–LOK.
In 2013 Architectural Record awarded him with the Design Vanguard Award, a prize given to ten practitioners internationally. The same year, Wallpaper* named him one of the top twenty emerging architects in the world, and included him in the 2013 Architects Directory. He is the recipient of the 2012 – 2013 Rome Prize Fellowship in Architecture awarded by the American Academy in Rome. He was awarded the 2011 Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and Designers.
O’Brien pursued his graduate studies at Harvard University where he was the recipient of the Master of Architecture Faculty Design Award. Prior to graduate school he attended Hobart College in New York where he studied architecture and music theory and was the winner of the Nicholas Cusimano Prize in Music. After completion of his graduate work he studied in Austria as the recipient of the Hayward Prize for Fine Arts Traveling Fellowship in Architecture under the sponsorship of The American Austrian Foundation. He has been named a MacDowell Fellow by the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and a Socrates Fellow by the Aspen Institute.
