title. MASKING
date. 2018
city. Santa Barbara
medium. Screen Prints + Lithograph
Architecture lacks the temporary nature of graphic design and visual art. However, the increased reading of architecture as image has brought architecture’s reception much closer to this realm.
To a modern audience hyper-comfortable with a constant saturation of color and pattern, the question becomes “Why are all the buildings so grey?”
The image is intended to be graphic but not pictographic. The prototypical mural surface is a blank canvas. This composition is directly connected to the medium itself, distorted by the undulation of the screen and fragmented by the varied amount of angled openings.
Typographic and painterly forces collide in a confluence of figure/ground that can be read from various distances, its legibility morphing in and out of focus as one moves closer and further away.
.jpg)
MASKING is an exhibit of drawings representing a year-long conversation between Robin Donaldson, AIA and Mike Nesbit about the role of drawing within contemporary Art and Architecture. Though architectural drawings are conventionally used for making buildings, the drawings in this exhibit reinterpret three projects within the catalog of ShubinDonaldson’s built work and become the basis for realizing a new set of drawings, referential but not necessarily representative of the building from which they came.
In the “hands- on” analog process of working with techniques and printmakers including El Nopal Press (lithography) and Wranch Studio (screen printing). making drawings becomes an exercise in critical judgment at the moment of production, requiring a disciplined and playful sensibility for curation and composition. While making the drawings in this exhibit, technical accidents and mistakes are accepted and invited as opportunities to reveal a new set of formal contingencies embedded in the built work. working with drawing as a creative technique to distill new relationships from the architectural process for the purpose of art, this exhibit presents architectural drawing combined with the artistic idiosyncrasies of two individuals and the Master Printers with whom they worked.