In the landmark exhibition Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices, and Architectural Interventions new work by Architecture associate professor David Gissen and Architecture visiting faculty members Mason White and Lola Sheppard (333: Architecture Summer Studio) is currently on display through February 18 at the Center for Art and Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno.

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The exhibition was curated by renowned architectural writer Geoff Manaugh, author of BLDGBLOG and The BLDGBLOG Book (Chronicle Books, 2009), former senior editor of Dwell magazine, and contributing editor at Wired UK. It was mounted in the museum's 2,500-square-foot Contemporary Gallery as a part of its 2011 Season of Art + Environment Exhibition Series.

The exhibition, a mix of large-scale installations, technical prototypes, wall-sized graphics, and portable devices, opened August 13, and also includes work by Mark Smout and Laura Allen (Smout Allen), David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang (The Living), and Chris Woebken and Kenichi Okada (Animal Superpowers, and Liam Young (Tomorrow's Thoughts Today).

From Manaugh: “The exhibition investigates the shifting terrains of architectural invention, where the construction of new spatial devices on a variety of scales, from the inhabitable to the portable, can uncover previously inaccessible aspects of the built and natural environments. The devices on display—and the traces they reveal—demonstrate that the landscape around us is like sheet music: an interpretive repository of bewildering variation that can be captured and made visible (even audible) through the perceptual instruments and recording devices that we invent.”

Many of the interdisciplinary proposals and projects in the exhibition address a variety of contemporary issues surrounding modern landscapes including climate change, resource scarcity, and cultural preservation and destruction.

"Museums of the City"

In his contribution, "Museums of the City," Gissen imagines how the type of spot-lit, conservation-oriented environment we find inside a museum might migrate outside, transforming everyday urban landscapes into more thoroughly protected and historical features of cities. (Note: The “Museums of the City” contribution was generously sponsored by the Nevada Museum of Art’s Center for the Art and Environment and the California College of the Arts Chalsty Fund.)

Images of highways, parks, urban rivers, and monuments -- transformed into curated and conserved spaces -- suggest how often-overlooked scenes of a city’s environmental and social past can be reframed in spatially complex ways. The contribution is part of what Gissen calls “experimental history” -- a practice of history that is as visual as it is textual; it investigates what history looks like and how it performs and appears.

Mason White & Lola Sheppard

White and Sheppard, who cotaught the 333: Architecture Summer Studio with Architecture faculty member Mona El-Khafif, provided work that investigates new types of architecture for the shifting layer of permafrost in the arctic landscape. They ask how new types of architecture can respond to this dynamic landscape, further damaged and unpredictable due to the effects of climate change. The proposals include Caribou migration stations, ice-road truck stops, airport-hospitals, and other new buildings for this melting, northern world.

Also at the Museum . . .

Landscape Futures is one of several exhibitions currently on display at the Nevada Museum of Art that address themes of human transformation to the natural and urban environment. The exhibition This is Not a Trojan Horse by Fine Arts visiting faculty member (and founder of the artists’ collective Futurefarmers) Amy Franceschini and writer Michael Taussig, a professor of anthropology at the European Graduate School, earned them the first Artists | Writers | Environments award (the A|W|E Grant) -- a $10,000 award funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts). The award recognizes visual artists and writers who work together in the field.

Read more about Amy Franceschini »

Related

Learn more about CCA's Architecture Program, including how to apply.
Bookmark David Gissen's new website to review all his latest work.
Watch a demonstration of Smout Allen's installation »