Detours, Mergers & Mutations: A Conversation About Art, Architecture and Design
February 23, 2010 | Levent OZLER
The School of Art & Design and the Interior Design Department at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT) will host Detours, Mergers & Mutations, a conversation about art, architecture, and design with Vito Acconci, Chuck Hoberman and Allan Wexler. This event will take place on Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 6:00 pm in the Katie Murphy Amphitheater at FIT, Seventh Avenue and 27th Street. The discussion will be moderated by Andrew Moszynski, associate professor, Department of Interior Design, FIT. No reservations are required; admission is free and open to the public.
Acconci, Hoberman, and Wexler are known for having made the boundaries between creative disciplines malleable in their work. By engaging various disciplines simultaneously or by evolving through a trajectory, each has defined a unique space in which their work can exist.
Vito Acconci
Starting as a poet in the mid-1960s, Vito Acconci became a defining and influential figure in the art world during the 1970s through his physically and emotionally visceral performances, videos, and installations. An interest in exploring the definition and intersection of public and private space, always present in his work, led him to public sculpture and, in 1988, to his design and architectural practice, Acconci Studio.
Acconci's work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Tate Liverpool, and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Acconci Studio designed the Open-Book Store at the Armory Art Fair in 2007; Wave-A-Wall, a facade for the West 8th Street Station in Coney Island in 2006; Mur island, Graz, Austria; and The United Bamboo Clothing Store in Tokyo in 2003, among others.
Chuck Hoberman
Chuck Hoberman is an inventor widely known for his transformable structures - objects that fold, retract, or shape-shift. He is the founder of Hoberman Associates, a multidisciplinary practice which designs consumer products, deployable shelters, and space structures. He has designed a line of toys, including the iconic Hoberman Sphere. In 2002, his Hoberman arch was the centerpiece of the Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, and he was featured in the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition Design and the Elastic Mind in 2008.
In the past year, Hoberman completed two major architectural projects: an elegant, wave-like façade on high-end Japanese cosmetics brand POLA's new retail space in Tokyo and a massive, seven-story transformable video screen for the Irish rock band U2's 2009 world tour.
Allan Wexler
Sculpture, installation, design, and architecture merge in the work of Allan Wexler. Through the use of basic building materials, Wexler explores our interaction with the everyday world and each other in his beautifully crafted, deceptively simple furniture pieces. In his public art projects, designed in collaboration with his wife, Ellen Wexler, these concerns are moved into a larger arena. Scale changes and materiality is enhanced, while humor and sensitivity remain intact
As an architect, Wexler is engaged with the process and logic of building and structure. As a sculptor, he defies it in order to explore our basic needs and modes of connection. Represented by Ronald Feldman Fine Arts in New York City, Wexler was the recipient of the 2009 Henry J Lier Award and the 2004-05 Rome Prize Fellowship in Design. He teaches at Parsons, The New School for Design.
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