Exhibition

  • Roomograph
    Dina Dietsch
    Curator
    deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park
    Sep 23, 2011 to Jan 04, 2012
  • GRANTEE
    Alexander Schweder La
    GRANT YEAR
    2011

Alex Schweder La, A Sac of Rooms All Day Long, 2009, San Francisco, CA. Photo: SFMOMA / Ian Reeves.

Roomograph is an inflatable, room-scaled installation made from a combination of clear and photosensitive materials. When lit, it looks like a puffy space with places to sit or lay. As people interact with it, Roomograph works like a photogram, its photosensitive surfaces are blocked from light as occupants linger. When the lights go out, occupants see their outlines as shadows on a glowing field. Roomograph is comprised of two forms, one occupied at the perimeter and one at the center, encouraging individual and group experiences respectively. When the lights are out, the previously illuminated/ inflated form is displaced by its counterpart. During this shifting, the glowing portions will be all a visitor sees and occupants will witness their shadowy trace, as it becomes incorporated into the architecture—until there is no way to distinguish between the body and the building.

Alex Schweder La has been experimenting with time- and performance-based architecture including Flatland at New York's Sculpture Center, Its Form Will Follow Your Performance at Gallery Magnus Muller in Berlin, A Sac of Rooms All Day Long at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and Counterweight Roommate at SCOPE Basel 2011. Schweder La's projects have been collected by several eminent individuals and institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He is has been artist-in-residence at the Kohler Company and the Chinati Foundation, and is the subject of the film Space Time Performance. Schweder La holds a MArch from Princeton University (1998) and a BArch from Pratt Institute (1993), and was a Rome Prize Fellow in Architecture (2006). He now teaches at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and the Institute for Art and Architecture in Vienna.