on view: April 13 - May 11, 2002
Opening Reception: April 13, 5 - 7pm

Architecture for One: Places and Spaces

Stephen Antonakos - Marcia Hafif - Si-Yeon Kim - Howard McCalebb - Richard Nonas - Atim Anette Oton - Mia Westerlund Roosen

The second exhibition in Architecture at five myles looks at personal space as defined or envisioned by visual artists.

Stephen Antonakos’ model of a pristine chapel,Chapel of St. Nicholas, acknowledges a time and space, where a different consciousness is possible. A geometric formalist, Antonakos has worked with light and interiors for over 40 years. His elemental material geometries and space-defining light constructions offer a dialogue, an exchange, between the space established by art and the viewers inner space. Their sense of habitable harmony prompted the exhibition of his full-scale Chapel of Theotokosin the “Reflections of Freedom” show at Frankfurt’s Schirn Kunsthalle.

Marcia Hafif is primarily known as a monochrome painter. She became concerned with architecture when she drew up plans for her own house, and inserted egg-like niches as the most natural form of shelter. Elliptical shapes began to appear in her drawings, and she realized the comfort and pleasure one would derive from living in oval rooms. The three-dimensional quilted floor planin the exhibition, Quilted Oval House, can be seen as a foretaste of how that might feel.

Si-Yeon Kim, a recent graduate from the School of Visual Arts,cuts and shapes paper into sculptural sites; for her these constructed places embody the process of mapping a new identity as a recent immigrant to the U.S. With Nest, the work she has constructed for this exhibition, she softens the edges of her new environment, to produce a perfectly secure place, albeit one made of paper.

Howard McCalebb’s art currently involves the creation of architectonic structures that double as containers for the multi-faceted realities of life. The containers provide for a new world of opportunity and unorthodox dexterity. They can be left empty or contain anything, both possibilities are equally interesting. –The structure is a conceptual, not a formal extension of Andy Warhole’s frame. The representation of Containerin the exhibition is totally negotiable.

Richard Nonas makes primary objects that serve as anchors for silent places. His sculpture is about the power of concentrated forms whose distilled energy encroaches on one another and on the world around them; it is also about the emotionally charged places that these objects create.

Atim Anette Oton is a Nigerian-born architectural designer who was awarded a 2002 NYSCA grant in the Architecture, Planning and Design Program for The Black Hair Salon. She is currently working on an interactive digital exhibition about typologies of black women’s spaces and their aesthetics within large cities like New York. The project is given its send-off at five myles with the exhibition of Atim Oton’s model The Black Hair Salon. Oton has been involved in projects on black culture and architecture such as the African Burial Ground Interpretive Center, Blacklines Magazine and the Underground Railroad Project.

Mia Westerlund Roosen uses Small Enclosuresas metaphors for the body. She has inserted serialized reductive forms in walls or in some cases constructed the wallsfrom simple organic shapes. The models for these pieces in the exhibition are made of ceramic. The actual enclosures are made of concrete and steel or of stuccoed brick.Westerlund Roosen’s architectural similes are about skin and bone and light.

———

For the third exhibition in Architecture at five myles, September 7 - October 3, 2022, Karl Jensen will construct an extraordinary pulpit from which he symbolically shouts out his disenchantment with the withering austerity of twentieth century building. At the same time Jensen’s pulpit retains the keep regard for construction that defined that century’s architecture.

James Rossant: New York LiveFeb 16 –Mar 10, 2002
Group Show: Architecture for One Apr 10 -May 7, 2002
Karl Jensen: Pulpit September 7 - October 3, 2002

DIRECTIONS:

Take 2, 3, or 4 trains to Franklin Avenue. Walk two blocks against the traffic on Franklin. Walk ¾ block to 558 St. Johns Place. FiveMyles is within easy walking distance from the Brooklyn Museum.