On the avant-garde art scene in Milwaukee

In the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

University of Massachusetts, Boston
November 3, 2011

I will be speaking about my forthcoming book,
Replacing Home: From Primordial Hut to Digital Network in Contemporary Art

“Life Cycles: Strange Vegetation and Architectural Symbiosis”

Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum
2200 North Terrace Avenue
Milwaukee, WI 53202

in association with the exhibition
Strange Vegetation:
Yevgeniya Kaganovich
in collaboration with Nathaniel Stern

June 8th-July 25th, 2011

Strange Vegetation grows an ecological system out of the Villa Terrace Decorative Arts Museum’s unique decorative interior. It is a site-specific installation incorporated with the repeated pattern of exotic greenery and floral iron work on the walls around it. Here, a system of physically interconnected and identical plant-like forms project, as bulbous roots, from the floor. Their stalks reach from below painted skirting to the wallpaper above. Over a dozen of these large latex volumes slowly breathe in and out, an inflation and deflation cycle that gradually distorts each form.

Strange Vegetation germinates and mutates the wallpaper’s images into living and breathing things; where paint and wallpaper meet becomes the ground from which foliage sprouts; and these inflated volumes interweave with one another and the implied life of the cultural institution.

The Villa Terrace is intended to accumulate and preserve the products of human time. Strange Vegetation, then, thinks beyond this lifecycle – in Earth time. It is a fantastical organism that uses the museum as a seed, transforming it from space, to habitat, to ecosystem in an imagined future. Strange Vegetation suggests that all built environments are (a) vibrant matter with the capacity for their own movement, change and agency over time.

March 10-13, 2011: New Orleans, LA

Architectural Spaces: On and Off the Screen

Panel Chair: Jennifer Johung

Drew Ayers (Georgia State University), “The Prismatic Subjectivities and Material Imagination of Kielowski’s DECALOGUE”

Richard Farmer (University College London), “The Dying of the Light: Cinemagoing and the Blackout in Britain During the Second World War”

Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece (Northwestern University), “Film’s Endless Space: The Streamlined Movie Theatre, Spectatorship, and Modernist Architecture”

Amy Herzog (Queens College/City University of New York), “Visualizing the Virtual Citizen: Architectural Rendering Software, “Aspirational” Aesthetics, and the Colonization of Public Space”

March 3-6, 2011: Montreal, Canada

“Architecture on the Move: Towards a Theory of Replacing”

Paper presentation by Jennifer Johung

Without fully celebrating our nomadic release from territorial borders or longing nostalgically for a return to tightly localized communities, what does it mean, now in light of our multiple movements and temporary situations, to draw a spatial boundary? Who gets to choose to be spatially situated, for however long, and who has that situation chosen for them? How might we be in one place, whether voluntarily or involuntarily, where we could we find ourselves lingering with others? And how does this one place become a home? If to be in one place is to be still, perhaps to belong and to find home however momentarily or accidentally, then how can we situate ourselves while also on the move, both towards and away from each other?

This paper examines contemporary modular and mobile architectural constructions that attend to the movements of their inhabitants across the globe. Andrea Zittel constructs compact living units that can fold in and out like sides of a box for spatial variation and transportation. Lot-ek reforms a shipping container into a Mobile Dwelling Unit, but also imagines it capable of docking in and out of pre-established harbors located around the world. As bodies come together and apart, across a series of sites and over a course of time, so too do the component parts of these kinds of nomadic habitations. Easy to transport and quick to assemble, modular structures must, however, address both chosen and forced dislocation, responding not only to those who are continuously on the move, but also to those who are seeking temporary refuge. With this in mind, the paper turns to Japanese architect Shigeru Ban’s modular paper tube architecture that provides immediate emergency relief to victims of natural disasters and political upheaval.