The Storefront for Art and Architecture Gets Shrink Wrapped by SO-IL
We get frustrated every time we try to use Saran Wrap on the leftover half of a lemon, so we can’t imagine shrink-wrapping the entire ground floor of a building. But that’s exactly what design firm SO-IL did at the Storefront for Art and Architecture.
The installation is part of Storefront’s latest exhibit BLUEPRINT, which showcases 50 blueprints from various disciplines dating from 1961 to 2013. The show was also curated by SO-IL. By wrapping the exterior of the space, the gallery is “totally open, yet perpetually closed and fixed… wrapped in time and in space.”
SO-IL is “an idea-driven design office that brings together extensive experience from the fields of architecture, academia, and the arts.” They’ve worked on projects from the master plan of a cultural campus in Shanghai, China to a series of prints for the Guggenheim Museum to the Frieze Art Fair. Their latest installation and exhibit at the Storefront for Art and Architecture is a far cry from the futuristic pink amoeba that recently occupied the space, a testament to the diversity of material presented at the institution.
The Storefront is well known in architecture and design circles for its façade–designed by artist Vito Acconci and architect Steven Holl–which is punctuated by rotating panels of various orientation and size that blur the border between the interior gallery and the street. The taut material that SO-IL used to wrap this façade causes the space to lose “its literal operational transparency to become a white, translucent icon of its curatorial aspirations. Rendering everything on either side as a world of shadows, the installation denies the spatial properties and the implications of the processional exit of the platonic cave towards a world of truth,” falling in line with the contradictions and paradoxes of the blueprints inside.
BLUEPRINT is on view until March 21st, and you can find out more information here.
[Related: Futuristic-looking Pink Amoeba by THEVERYMANY Wants You to Explore Its Insides]
[Via Designboom]
Images © Iwan Baan, courtesy of SO-IL
