WINDOW RESEARCH INSTITUTE

The Window Research Institute partners with the Canadian Centre for Architecture to offer the CCA-WRI Research Fellowship. In this article, we introduce the research project of Jessica Vaughn, one of the 2022 fellows. 

 

Project Overview

Artistic practices of site-specific installation like Gordon Matta-Clark’s maintain an improvisational sensibility where the artworks are not about architecture proper, but the improvision that happens through the splitting and cutting of the building frames encountered. The forms and artworks that Matta Clark created through the breaking-up of space and reconfiguring of larger parts was about the process, the space between concept and completion that cannot be contained,- his artistic labor. The films by Matta-Clark that I viewed at CCA, Day’s End, Conical Intersect and Office Baroque showed how his cuts created new boundaries and landscapes within sites already slated for demolition. Matta-Clark’s cuts created a fixture in the architecture for the light to seep in and out of. The framing created through his splits and cuts become containers or in this case fixtures for the 24/7 light. More importantly in Matta-Clark’s work, light exceeds the frame.

When improvisation is taken into consideration regarding Matta-Clark’s artistic labor (e.g.- physical cuts into buildings, to procuring city land) larger political questions come to the fore. Questions concerning the uselessness that capitalism can render on particular types of labor performed by workers (including work performed by the artist himself) becomes paramount. Matta-Clark’s Fake Estates gives concrete form to the critique of property laws, city infrastructure and capitalism. One could say that the physical land that Matta- Clark purchased was what constituted the frame (that is city infrastructure, and city policies that govern the city and capital). The social spaces that he was able to create through his art practice (like Anarchitecture) were the residual affects that seeped outside the frame.

My research into-Matta’s Clark’s archive supported the development of two series of works. The fist being a series of light sculptures that will be shown at my first European institutional solo exhibition at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen from March-May 2023. These sculptures employed static light readings taken from several Montreal work locations in 2022.
The second project, The Internet of Things, was organized for the 2023 Frieze Art Fair at The Shed exhibition space in New York City. Having the opportunity to view Matta-Clark’s Money series of enlarged images of American bill currency, inspired the completion of this work. The Internet of Things features 32, 32″ x 96″ digitally printed images on linen and canvas that re-envision American geography, through the structures that efficiently organize late capitalism, commerce, leisure, financial debt, and public displays of violence and death. The infrastructure of the postal system, mail barcodes, security envelope patterns, direct mail advertising pieces, and the outside and inside of mail create this expansive conceptual landscape.

Excerpted from the video recording of the 2022 CCA-WRI Research Symposium (August 24, 2022, Montreal)