Megan and Murray McMillan

“Transgressive Architecture”
Alex Schweder and Ward Shelley
Thursday, April 24, 6:30 pm

Sert Gallery, 3rd floor
Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts
24 Quincy St, Cambridge, MA
http://www.ves.fas.harvard.edu/BYO.html

Drinks and Dinner Provided

From the press release:

Both Alex Schweder, an architect, and Ward Shelley, an artist, move outside of the traditional boundaries of their respective disciplines, working together on projects they call “Performance Architecture.” Schweder and Shelley will explore their collaboration and the impact of their expansion of individual authorship on two of their joint projects: Flatland, a installation at the Sculpture Center in 2007 and Stability, a work currently in progress. Both coauthored works consider buildings as performative texts, framing buildings themselves as performances that require the live bodies of the artists to be actualized. Experiencing a “productive discomfort” while bodily manipulating pieces of buildings, participants in Schweder and Shelley’s installations are asked to consider buildings as being constructed as much through behavior as they are from bricks, helping to craft an architectural and artistic practice in which bodies are as essential as beams. So doing, their work constructs a more expansive definition of how architecture acts on spaces and bodies, and occasions a reevaluation of the relationship between architect, artist, performance, and public space.

Alex Schweder‘s art and architecture transgresses the boundaries between the two disciplines, proposing an interdisciplinary hybrid. He is the 2005-2006 Rome Prize Fellow in Architecture it was here that Schweder and Shelley met and began to collaborate. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including Henry Urbach Architecture in New York, the Sculpture Center in Long Island City, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the St. Louis Art Museum, the Tacoma Art Museum, the Netherlands Architecture Institute, and the Museo d’Arte Contemporane di Roma.

Ward Shelley lives and works as an artist in New York. He specializes in large projects that freely mix sculpture, architecture and performance. Utilizing eclectic influences and a variety of media, Shelley’s installations examine the mutually formative relationship between subject and object, often in the form of functioning architectural pieces in which he lives and works during the exhibition monitored with live surveillance video equipment. His work is in the collections of several museums including the Museum of Modern Art and the Brooklyn Art Museum.