Shrink-Wrapped Storefront

John Hill

26. gennaio 2015

Photo: John Hill/World-Architects

The curators of BLUEPRINT, which opened Friday at New York's Storefront for Art and Architecture, have wrapped the facade by Steven Holl and Vito Acconci in white plastic.

Storefront's 1993 Acconci-Holl facade is an operable one, made up of rectangular and other orthogonally shaped panels that open and close, depending on the exhibition and the weather. Many exhibitions interact with the facade in some way, usually via a graphic appliqué, but curators Sebastiaan Bremer and Florian Idenburg & Jing Liu of SO–IL have taken a unique approach and frozen the facade in one position. The open panels make themselves known by stretching the plastic that covers everything but a central doorway that gives access to the BLUEPRINT exhibition. Storefront director Eva Franch i Gilabert describes the installation:

Wrapped in time and in space, the Acconci-Holl façade opens its doors permanently to the works that –while present in the show by reference– are outside the gallery walls. The space looses its literal operational transparency to become a white, translucent icon of its curatorial aspirations. Rendering everything on either side as a world of shadows, the installation denies the spatial properties and the implications of the processional exit of the platonic cave towards a world of truth.

BLUEPRINT is on display until 21 March 2015.