UB faculty take lead in echo Art Fair’s inaugural architecture exhibition

Faculty from the School of Architecture and Planning played a key role in this year’s echo Art Fair, a juried fine arts exposition that for the first time featured an architecture exhibition.

“Light Industry,” curated by architect and designer Jordan Geiger, assistant professor of architecture, included full-scale installations by several faculty members from UB’s architecture program.

The exhibition, held May 13-15, drew inspiration from the physical setting of the event — OSC Manufacturing & Services Inc. on Buffalo’s East Side, originally a General Motors Chevrolet assembly plant and one of the city’s finest examples of industrial architecture.

Designed by prominent 20th-century industrial architect Albert Kahn, the building and its innovations in concrete formwork, open floor plans and factory daylighting provide material, cultural and structural context for the works. The title serves as a prompt, rather than a theme, triggering participants’ different responses to its possible meanings here.

“Industry has always been at home in Buffalo and it remains so today,” Geiger said. “These installations offer four different takes on ‘Light Industry,’ marked by luminosity, light-weight materials, industrious design practices and more. These will be architectures for a new era and from a new generation.”

The projects were:

“Albert Kahn Memorial Lounge” by Julia Jamrozik and Coryn Kempster is a space of rest and of levity, located between installations and covered by a white sheet of undulating housewrap that diffuses light as it repeats a string of roof sections from varied Kahn daylight factory buildings. Jamrozik is assistant professor of architecture and Kempster is adjunct assistant professor of architecture at UB. They regularly collaborate as the artist/designer team BACKOFFICE.

“No Frills” by Ang Li is at once a lightweight, false fifth column within the factory’s grid — a collaboration with digital fabrication practices and landmark terra cotta manufacturer Boston Valley Terra Cotta — and a viewing space that operates at many scales. Its details blur the boundary between ornament (frills) and structure. Li is the 2015-16 Peter Reyner Banham Fellow at the School of Architecture and Planning.

“The Cube of Memory” by Miguel Guitart is a luminous, filtering screen that fits a space within the building’s assembly line spaces and shifts circulation around it with views to the building’s interiors through the cube's faded surfaces. Guitart is visiting associate professor of architecture.

“Carpenter Brownstone” and “Thespian Brownstone” are two in a series of totems, constructions that operate between the scales of a model, furniture and a full-scale habitable space. Each refers to the “light industry” found in adaptations and shifts in language, embodied in utopian architectural spaces that draw inspiration in the writings of African-American poets June Jordan, Amiri Baraka and Angela Davis. This growing work is by UB architecture graduate Charles Davis and collaborators Emily Clodfelter, Phillip Broszkiewicz and William “Glen” Watson. Davis is assistant professor of architectural history and criticism, and Clodfelter, Broszkiewicz and Watson are students, all at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

“Light Industry” shared space with site-specific, performance-art installations led by Rachel Adams, associate curator of the UB Art Galleries. Designed to play off and enliven the atmosphere of the fair, these works included a dance performance that integrated the architecture of the Albert Kahn building, a collaborative weaving project and a bike performance that wove through the East Side.

Also featured at this year’s echo Art Fair was Virginia Melnyk, adjunct professor of architecture, who was selected as a site-specific installation artist, and invited exhibitor Karen Tashjian, a longstanding UB architecture professor and highly regarded regional artist.

Architect-artist Dennis Maher, clinical assistant professor of architecture, also presented at echo in conjunction with the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and its collaborative Society for the Advancement of Construction Related Arts (SACRA).

One of the region’s most notable art events, echo Art Fair connects art enthusiasts and buyers with emerging and established local, regional and international artists in a centralized and creative environment. Now in its fifth year, the event spans the disciplines of painting, photography, sculpture, print, mixed media, performance art — and now architecture.