EXHIBITION/ARCHITECTURAL INSTALLATION
For The Amaranthine Room, we created a large scale installation made from remnants and surplus materials from our studio production. Like amaranth, a flowering plant that self-sows through a prolific production of seed, the components of the installation are also “generative objects.” A bespoke drawing table and a screened meditation hut are designed to support the creative process and produce the conditions necessary for new ideas to emerge. The installation imports into the gallery a representation of a landscape near Iola, Wisconsin, where this architectural experiment will ultimately be installed, representing an initial gesture toward transforming an inherited parcel of land into an open-air studio and incubator for creative exploration.
Amaranth is a flowering plant that produces hundreds of thousands of miniscule seeds. These seeds scatter widely and proliferate easily, generating many more new plants, which, in turn multiply further. As a metaphor for an art practice, it describes an artist’s aspiration, that each new idea will generate countless more. Implied by the same metaphor, however, is also the fragility of this cycle, the many ways it can be interrupted, and the fact that not every seed is viable.
The Amaranthine Room represents a constellation of moments from an art practice:
1. The generative studio desk where ideas manifest. 2. The generated idea – an architectural form situated within an abstraction of its eventual location, made from recycled studio materials. 3. Finished artworks – prints, drawings, and sculptures – sometimes using shapes found during the fabrication process, sometimes pulled from past collections where threads of the ideas represented in this exhibition may have begun. 4. Photographs and specimens culled from nature – experiences and observations in the world, synthesized and redrafted through studio production. 5. Propositions for future possibilities through models, mockups, and speculative drawings.
Our creative process involves collaboration with others. We’d like to acknowledge studio assistants Ava Hager, Charlotte Poehlmann, Reese Rousseau, and Joe Thrasher for their fabrication and installation support, Tina Schinabeck and John Sobczak for the space and opportunity to exhibit our work, Alec Regan for his insight and critique, and Bryan and Darlene Budsberg for their generous monetary gift, and their consent to add a small structure to the Budsberg family land which they so diligently steward.
