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Suspense is a recent architectural installation by Sophia Chang at the INVIVIA Gallery. INVIVIA and Rocker-Lange Architects curated and sponsored the interactive installation, an unexpected fabric space that manipulates the architectural frame to blur the boundaries between inside and outside and piques the viewers’ awareness of their bodies in space.
The softened geometries of this expansive fabric insertion frame both people and their context, while confounding the experience of interior and exterior, wall and room; hiding and revealing places to be found and explored. Upon entering the piece, both occupant and environment are estranged, creating greater awareness of one’s self, one’s relation to others, and relationships to one’s surroundings.
The installation’s curved rooms are made from Lycra fabric that is suspended between rectangular frames, which capture moments of the original context and pull them into the suspended space. Visitors occupy both sides of the frames, creating playful interaction between those enclosed within the fabric and those outside. Looking around, the smooth fabric surface breaks open to a view of an old stone wall, a glimpse of brick, a stair, or out to the street. The re-captured everyday appears distant and other.
The installation is conceived as multiple layers of poché. The term commonly refers to the space within walls, here poché receives a more ambiguous reinterpretation: what could be understood as a wall or reminiscent space from one vantage point, becomes an inhabitable room from another. The complexity of the curved forms precludes immediate understanding of the total piece and allows for the visitor’s perception of the space to shift as they continue to discover new places to sit, contemplate, walk, and watch within the gallery. Neighboring wall spaces are activated as people encounter each other through the fabric. The installation is an ‘open work’ (Umberto Eco) as it is not limited to a single reading or a predetermined range of readings but rather encourages multiple readings. With changes of light, occupation, and the flexing of the geometries, new realizations continuously become possible.
Installation Artist
Sophia Chang (Harvard GSD March ’13) is an architect, whose work occupies the zone between art, media, and architecture, producing designs, which are not objects to be looked at, but experiences to be seen or lived through. She recently completed her Master of Architecture with distinction at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
via invivia.com