February 28–May 17, 2008
Shadi Nazarian
Brochure available with essay by Timothy Murray.
Lightwell Gallery Project
Shadi Nazarian frames and choreographs an architectural experience as audiences are drawn toward a responsive minimalist structure in the Lightwell Gallery, seemingly hovering in midair. Working in the fertile intersections of art, architecture, and emergent technology, she employs switchable Liquid crystal layered privacy glass to explore cognition and think about the ways in which we navigate the environment we live in. In the commercial sector, privacy glass has been used primarily for partitions, display cases, bank screens, and as enclosures for conference rooms, and provocatively, in dressing rooms and bathrooms. Presented in an academic and artistic context, Introversions seeks to discover how new materials such as privacy glass fundamentally alter spatial relationships and human perception. Nazarian isolates and enhances disorienting moments inherent to urban conditions that are triggered by reflections and other intriguing sights seen out of the corner of the eye by combining minimalist sculpture and architecture to generate uncanny optical effects.
Nazarian moved to New York City in 1989 to join I.M. Pei & Partners as an architectural designer and then to Ithaca, NY to teach at Cornell University (1991-92, and 1999-2002). She has been teaching at the State University of New York at Buffalo in the School of Architecture and Urban Planning since 1994.
Curated by Sandra Q. Firmin.
Introversions is sponsored in part, by grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and New York Foundation of the Arts special opportunity stipends, as well as the support of KNEMA, LLC, Polytronix, Inc. and SMG HARSON.