R-T-MInformation

Projects

Print Ready Drawings Print Ready Drawings investigates the process behind printed images. The exhibition features prints and reproductions, exploring a history of architectural authorship not via singular authors but through an examination and display of the material supplies and techniques of drawing production. The exhibition includes a variety of production ephemera, technical manuals, and samples, alongside artist’s films that turned the camera inward towards the process itself, including Richard Serra’s Color-Aid film. Several drawings featured in the exhibition, considered too fragile to be exhibited, are replicated through a process of material and technical research in conservation labs, manufacturing workshops, eBay, and oral histories. This research and the copies are documented in films made by Julie Riley and Jenny Leavitt that interpret and translate historical materials and modes of making.


Exhibition design in collaboration with Current Interests, Curator: Sarah Hearne  

MAK Center, Los Angeles, CA, November 2023 – February 2024
Photographs: Matthew Au

Exhibition Copies

For the exhibition Print Ready Drawings, artist Julie Riley and filmmaker Jenny Leavitt constructed “exhibition copies” of drawings deemed too fragile to be displayed, documenting their process through video and still imagery to interpret historical media and modes of making. Their interpretations touch on the often-gendered divisions between craft and art, creative and technical work, and copying and innovation. Riley and Leavitt hosted a hands-on workshop that asked museum-goers to participate in reconstructing an artwork in the show. During a 2 hour workshop, patrons masked, taped, airbrushed, marked, and assembled exhibition copies. The workshop was broadcast through live-stream video feeds capturing hands and pans style documentation. 
 
Workshop & Discussion 
Live Stream: “Exhibition Copies Live Stream”, 1 Hour, color, audio

MAK Center, Los Angeles, CA, February 2024 Photographer: Julie Riley

Surface, Level / Good Guts
This work reconsiders the role of the plinth as an object that supports other works, such as buildings, sculptures, statues, etc., into surfaces or, more specifically, plates. The project proposes the de-lamination of the plinth as an object into surfaces that work between drawing and model to re-see the plinth and its surfaces not as a final work but as a material site that instructs, levels, and repositions. The plate's four flip mill models are between drawing and model, using the CNC mill to inscribe the work with annotations, coordination notes, and stacking instructions.

Surface, Level was exhibited at the Wedge Gallery in Burbank, CA, as part of a group show titled “Good Guts.” The plates were shown with four instruction drawings and line weight test models.

Wedge Gallery, Burbank, CA, Spring 2023
Photographer: Zoe Malecki

A Bath House Appearing Twice, Crudely
For this installation, Julie and Erik worked with d.esk to design and fabricate two side-by-side instances of a three-stepped structure model constructed twice. One is a 12-foot frame and panel assembly with graphic coding made from kraft paper water bags, fiberglass, and nylon. The second structure—composed of painter’s tape and rosin paper—echoes a traditional architectural study model but enlarged to a human-scale; this model similarly slumps down. Signs of architectural crudeness—leaks, stains, gaps, slumps, even yellowing and taping—proliferate indiscriminately. Alone, they’re craft-like and uncared for. Together, consistently deployed, each crude instance is buffed into a vulnerable sketch of likeness, if not strength.

Installation
Large Bath-House: fiberglass rods, metal brackets, nylon, reinforced paper, pool-liner, tape, clear tubing, filter nozzles, velcro, stables, water, 16’-3” W x 22’-5” D x 13’ H

Designed, fabricated, and constructed  on behalf of David Eskenazi [d.esk] SCI-Arc Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, October 2023 – January 2024
Photographs: Brian Guido

Bok Bar Table


A noodle-like table to seat 25 people at a rooftop bar in South Philadelphia. So long, that connections are engendered across and between as visitors nestle beside. 

“Like the wrinkled inner walls of mitochondria, or the folded brain surfaces which maximize neural density, the contained space of the table is extraordinary.”

Furniture
Table: plywood, wood, metal hardware, mirror, dye, resin, 12’ W x 15’ L x 42” H

Bok, Philadelphia, PA, 2017
Photographer: Austin McInnis

Visual Guide to a House Museum House museums can be defined as either: a.) a live-in museum, or b.) a house on display to visitors. Balancing the direction of attention between objects of interest and the environment they inhabit is accomplished by inscribing ‘frames’ to put things in their places. However, the continual need for remodeling and repair at these sites illustrates how the effort required to sustain a visitor’s experience is an ongoing and open-ended process. Rather than attempting to control construction, Visual Guide proposes an alternative notion of structural propriety–typically connoting firmness and stability–that welcomes decomposition, deformation and failure as moments in a continuum of dynamic behavior.

Wooster Street Gallery, New York City, NYC, Spring 2019, Photographs: Erik Tsurumaki

Reformatting Today, who can begin to say what our medium is? Drawings can look more or less like drawing. More often, they look more like renderings or paintings or just images, zooming across the web without any convictions whatsoever. We could really argue about the differences between these so-called drawings. We could also work through their effects, which is what happened here: some models of some fragments of a house - made of some images of that house

Los Angeles, CA, Spring 2020
Photographs: Erik Tsurumaki

R-T-M
2024