CCA News
Andrew Kudless: The Birth of a Sensate Project
Posted on Friday, September 25, 2009, by Brenda Tucker
Mutants, fictional bodies, animate architecture: these are among the provocations offered by Sensate: Bodies and Design, an exhibition currently on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art that reflects recent debates about what bodies are and how they are met and mirrored by design. It replaces traditional references to the body with approaches that admit greater complexity, nuance, and uncertainty.
The exhibition is curated by SFMOMA's Henry Urbach, who is also a faculty member in CCA's Graduate Program in Curatorial Practice. The show includes a piece by faculty member Thom Faulders and two large-scale installations that were commissioned and fabricated especially for the exhibition, one by the world-renowned architect / conceptual artist Alex Schweder, and the other by CCA Architecture faculty member Andrew Kudless and his firm Matsys.
Kudless's P_Wall is a grid of hexagonal cast-plaster tiles covering a gallery wall that is 45 feet long and 12 feet high. The tiles give the ordinarily smooth surface a decidedly different kind of skin—one that is irregular, saggy, and bulbous, reminiscent of aging human skin yet hard as a rock. In some places the wall bulges as much as 18 inches out into the room.
"This project investigates the self-organization of two materials, plaster and elastic fabric, to produce evocative visual and acoustic effects," says Kudless. "It was inspired by the work of the Spanish architect Miguel Fisac and his experiments with flexible concrete formwork in the 1960s and 1970s.
"I started with an image, and generated a cloud of points based on its grayscale values. I then used these points to mark the positions of dowels, over which I laid an elastic fabric, creating a mold. I poured plaster into the mold, and the fabric expanded under its weight. The resultant plaster tile has a certain resonance with the body as it sags, expands, and stretches, giving way to the forces of time and gravity."
Kudless made the first version of P_Wall, which was much smaller, in 2006. To re-create it at this scale for SFMOMA required many months of planning, research, and prototyping, and then two months more for fabrication. He worked extremely closely with Henry Urbach and the museum's crew to transport and install the piece. After the exhibition closes on November 8, P_Wall will become part of SFMOMA's permanent collection.