Cleveland needs to look north for inspiration - the Puglies

TOIstudio heads up to Toronto next week. I know I just returned from New York but the spring travel bug has bitten. I haven't been to Toronto since I was 13 or so and while a part of me wants to hunt down Steven Fong and complain about Kent's floundering ways I would rather walk the waterfront, compare the Condo situation with Cleveland's own and remiss not putting the journey off until May.

I will also attempt to tap into the vibrant and seemingly vocal local criticism of local architecture. Something that may be just starting to coagulate in Cleveland. While there have been some attempts to criticize and critique perhaps it should be taken a step further and openly judge.

The MarJ sent me a fine website called The People's Choice Awards for Architecture or the Puglies for short. There some of Toronto's architectural projects receive the dubious award of being shortlisted on a website where the public can chose which particular project is more offensive. The website is amazingly easy to navigate, offers quite a huge selection of choices and imagery and really does a fine job of driving the point home that the public has some discerning taste and it would be nice for developers to recognize that.

While I think the options in Cleveland may not be as varied (due to the same particular group of people churning out the same particularly poorly designed product) it would be nice to collect and disseminate imagery of the debacle, if only to share with the world and hopefully incite a revolution of good taste and proper decorum.

Viva la Revolucion!

Suzi's MFA - De-Wared

Suzi's MFA exhibit went off quite well. In fact I was rather impressed with how it turned out. I hope to get some more information (conceptual statement, etc) to put up on the collaborator's portion of the site with some video that I shot on a digital camera.

Artist's Statement-

In Denis Hollier's Against Architecture the writings of Georges Bataille, Hollier notes Bataille's discussion of language's possibility as a commodity or expenditure for control over subjectivity. Here the implications of exchange value (profit) over use-value (subjectivity), dictate the practice of art and architecture's effect on human experiences and thus resonates as post-modernism's current language of late capitalism.

In De-Wared, I attempt to utilize a new language to reverse the state of postmodernism's domination of exchange value as supported in Frederic Jameson's text: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. In defining language, I attest to Bataille's theory of language's ability (both visual and verbal) to either propel "into a dance, or fall into intoxication". Here language is a labyrinth, our existence, were an exit or discovery of freedom from confusion can be found when "lexical prisons are broken open". Confusion occurs when on loses identity and subjectivity within the barriers and entanglement of the web. In this way I search to exit from the commodity value of mass-marketed standards which over-power creativity and individual freedom.

By forcing standard, quarter-inch steel rods down to an unusable item so it is no longer representative of a ware, I find independence from the form it dictates to the user, and therefore coin a language that is not bound by market-value but rather by my own reality within this labyrinth. Although purchased as a commodity, I manipulate the steel to no longer promote the language of commodity and to remove its exchange-value. The de-wared steel serves as a metaphor to a culturally larger problem within late-capitalism in the hopes that it too can be ameliorated.

-Susan Quilligan

TOIstudio, on the road

For those of you wondering where the heck I have been lately, I was quite occupied with work for a while there and didn't really have much time to explore any opinion or thoughts on much except for being tired and hungry.

Currently though I have started fulfilling my wanderlust and am sitting in a rather nice apartment of some other TOIstudio-ers who have made the move to NYC in an effort to see what all the hubbub has been about.

Thoughts and impressions are varied. I actually really like the city because there is really so many interesting things to see and do, however at times the cacophony can be quite overwhelming, especially to such a small town boy as myself.

I haven't really done any things that one could consider 'touristy' except for Cai Guo-Qiang exhibit at the Guggenheim.

The major reason for my journey to NYC is Suzi's MFA exhibition at Pratt which I am excited to see the end result of the installation and will hopefully have some good pictures of the exhibition up soon (with Suzi's permission of course).

Regardless for those of you curious as to where I have been, that is where. Next week I plan on heading up to Toronto with the MarJ (who did not make the NYC trip and whom I admit I miss quite a lot) for some exploration of their waterfront. Hopefully I will have some coherent thoughts and impressions in a little while as I get to take the time to type something up. In the meantime I hope everyone is enjoying this little respite from my angst and taking some time themselves to relax.

Tremont Art Walk March 2008

Tremont Art Walk
March 14th, 2008
Tremont neighborhood of Cleveland, Ohio
6pm - 10pm

Alright, I don't know if this is a new website for the Tremont Art Walk but it is the most current one. At least it has the correct year on the calendar. Anyway, it seems to be still going on (13 years so far!) and despite the massively horrible winter weather it looks like it will start to really warm up Thursday and possibly be quite nice on Friday. So...go check out some galleries that typically have stringent hours when you have the chances to visit a bunch of them in one fell swoop.