03 FAMILIAL CLOUDS [2012] Exhibited: VENICE ARCHITECTURE BIENNALE 2012 New Zealand Contribution. completed for: Simon Twose Architect
Between March - August 2012 , Simon Twose and I designed, fabricated and installed this exhibition, which was the New Zealand contribution to the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale. Work on the table is by Andrew Barrie and a team of modelmakers from Auckland university. Text by Sarah Treadwell. _______________________ This exhibition, Familial Clouds is the work of two architects, Simon Twose and Andrew Barrie. Across the walls of the exhibition are two houses by Simon Twose, not organised as projects but rather as houses dispersed into clouds of process; productive lines, dead ends and frustrations, the usual stuff of family life. Now partial and oblique, 290 A1 drawings that composed the white house have been reduced to business card size (a million tiny objects that resist collection). Small mirrors, bracketed off the wall reflect and refract the drawings; the displacement of the images is matched by the rotating and twisting bodies that stare into the pre-positioned mirrors to find architecture. The mirrors offer a dislocated view that demonstrates the fleeting and difficult nature of the process of architectural practices and the transient nature of its products. The viewing body, shifted from the usual neutral mode of gallery contemplation, is momentarily comical and active. The conversation on the gallery wall then shifts from analogue practice to digital, in a project developed as an active response to the taut geological and aesthetic context of another New Zealand city, Wellington. In a miniature tectonic play, above the ominous meeting of Pacific and Australian plates, the concrete house’s massive elements are jolted together as if by large forces, as families are habitually shaken together and apart by influences beyond their control.