Lonn Combs
Changing Rooms
Installation
by Easton + Combs (Lonn Combs, Assistant Professor)
Location: Extension Gallery, Chicago.
CHANGING ROOM is a mirage of the intimate in the realm of the public. As the daydream is to daily life, a momentary slippage that can re-qualify the onslaught of a quotidian continuum, so too is the CHANGING ROOM to the urban field.
CHANGING ROOM redefines boundaries and expected conditions of intimacy while transforming into a subtle spectacle of the expectations and boundaries of intimate experience in the public realm. Expressed as a structural and material veil and suspended from above, the lightweight structural skin dilates along the bottom edge creating oblique visual corridors to the interior as well as passages for the body to move through. The skin culminates in an undulating skirt edge suspended above the surface of the gallery floor. Like a closet of two way mirrors, the limit and perception of the interior belies the condition of transparency and spectacle from the exterior.
Situated in the context of the gallery, this installation proposes it’s oscillating redefinitions of the intimate and the public as an experimental architectural expression. The psychological conditions associated with transparency, reflectivity, illumination and lightness intersect with their material expression in a lightweight semitransparent dichroic polycarbonate surface. This surface is the temporary veil that creates the ambient conditions of CHANGING ROOM. At the same time the surface is organized by the textile and tectonic logic of a herringbone weave to perform as a structural skin shell and create faceted surface conditions that allow for maximum visual dichroic and transparent effects.
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