los angeles CALIFORNIA

In the contemporary aesthetic landscape, image and architecture are closer than ever before. As a young collaborative, our practice engages the slippage between graphic issues (surfaces, painterly, and printerly visual structures) and received definitions of form. Older theoretical models imagined the phenomenological encounter between viewer and material artifact as a moment of spatial and corporeal awareness (self-realization or grounding). Discourse around the political agency of form was fueled by binaries between pure, abstract, geometries (deemed a more “conceptual” or cerebral experience by some) and the corporeal experience of materials, tectonics, and structural systems. We believe however, that the modern, urban subject’s perception of the world is always-already mediated by digital images and information, and that the aesthetic currency of a project has more to do with its graphic effects than ever before.

Thick Skin is an exercise in the perception of graphics and volume using advanced fabrication and imaging technologies. Our design is a large, monolithic object, that takes inspiration from the geological impulse in the proto-Minimalist sculptures of Tony Smith, the Earth Artist Michael Heizer’s photo-stamped geometric environments, and 3D painting programs native to the digital animation industry. Our design weds stereotomic massing logics (architectural geometries imitating rock formations and carving operations) to a hyper-flat printerly or decal-sensibility. Each panel of the piece is milled from Corian® Solid Surface sheets and printed with a 1:1 graphic. The structure of the piece responds to the unique geometry of each panel and proposes a system in which independent graphic, massing and tectonic systems operate in autonomous, but reciprocal material and visual relationships. Our installation is sited in the A+D Museum’s Island and Nook galleries; a large visual intervention in the postindustrial fabric of the L.A. Arts District. During the day the graphic panels of the object cue viewers into a juxtaposition between the rapidly developing, hyper-urban condition of downtown LA, and the material realities of the inhuman landscapes that surround it. The piece exists somewhere between an installation, an architectural prototype, and a post-human monument.

Thick Skin originated as an experiment in visual and materials research at the University of Michigan. The project would not have been possible without the generous support of the A+D Museum and the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. We would also like to thank Dupont Corian® Solid Surface materials, The 3M Company, Alro Steel, and Brilliant Graphics for their sponsorship.

Check out the object at: A+D Museum
Dates: 3.2.18-6.14.18
Opening Reception: 3.2.18 7pm-9pm

DESIGN:
Viola AGO
Hans TURSACK

DESIGN/FABRICATION TEAM:
Lisa KUHN
Colleen FELLOWS
Linda LEE
Kyle REICH
Kimball KAISER

SPONSORS:
A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning
University of Michigan
Dupont
Corian® Solid Surface
3M
Alro Steel
Brilliant Graphics

More information at www.hanstursack.com and www.violaago.com
or @hanstursack and @violaago

For Press Inquiries contact:
Leila WAHBA, A+D leila@aplusd.org