new haven CONNECTICUT

Yale University SOA
critic: michael YOUNG

suckerPUNCH: Describe your project.

melissa SHIN: This project explores the vicissitudinous juxtaposition between contemporary art and the environment in which it is exhibited. A grid or lattice was imposed upon the site as a response to the studio’s challenge of building on a site with very little organized urban context (the Brooklyn Navy yard) but within a city defined by a predominantly strong grid.

The lattice is transmogrified by a layered series of discrete operations based on program, aperture, and circulation to create dynamic spaces and views. This creates a narrative through a continuous space that exploits and challenges and tensions between volume and void, hard and soft, surface and structure, public and private, and interior and exterior.

sP: What or who influenced this project?
mS: Sol LeWitt; Musée Océanographique in Monaco; Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan; Ernesto Neto; the Surrealist photography of Hans Bellmer; Various sea creatures (Dumbo Octopus, Flamboyant Cuttlefish, etc).

sP: What were you reading/listening to/watching while developing this project?
mS: Rosalind Krauss, “Grids, You Say” and “Sculpture in the Expanded Field”; Greg Lynn, “The Folded, the Pliant, and the Supple”; Dennis Sheldon and Andrew Witt, “Continuity and Rupture”; Mario Carpo, “The Alphabet and the Algorithm”; Friday Night Lights.

sP: Whose work is currently on your radar?
mS: Herzog & de Meuron, Leong Leong, Gage/Clemenceau, Robert A.M. Stern.

Thanks to Michael Young (http://www.young-ayata.com/) for his sharp criticism and support throughout the semester.