Parallel Projections

Abstract

Parallel Projections investigates two types of postindustrial site: the architectural and the agricultural; it conflates (projections of and into) spaces as means of making visceral our intellectual comprehension of the relationships between materiality, surface, place and history. Parallel Projections is not meant for specific places but for specific kinds of spaces: defunct industrial buildings, abandoned urban edifices, and mechanized natural landscapes. The authors, living in places (Iowa and Ohio) that have both been radically altered by scalar economic shifts, adapt alien (guest) project components to their native (host) contexts. Both types of spaces, host and guest, as spaces of urban and rural abandonment, share surfaces that are compelling palimpsests. These surfaces are encrusted with nearly-obliterated histories, emptied by changes in production methods and habits of occupation and revealed by ghost texts. In opposition to the idea that these sites should be whitewashed and redrawn, the authors see them as grounds for new layers that can receive projections of phenomena from other postindustrial sites and as repositories for material evidence that deepens, rather than erases, the evidence of their pasts. Samantha Krukowski is an artist, author and educator. Her intermodal practices explore the nature of objects, records of experience, identities of places and the consequences of interventions. Her writing focuses on presence and absence in the pictorial field, rootedness and dislocation, and the nature of creativity. Her edited volume, Playa Dust: Collected Stories from Burning Man, was published in 2014. Krukowski’s experimental and painterly videos have screened at international film festivals, and her drawings, paintings and sculptural works have been exhibited internationally. She is a coordinator and teacher in the School of Design at the University of Cincinnati. Peter P. Goché is a practicing architect, artist and educator. Using site-adjusted installations Goché deploys an integrated approach to theoretical and practical questions pertaining to materiality and the re-occupation of postindustrial spaces. His work explores not only what material cultivations can be, but also what they do. He employs full-scale, three-dimensional methodologies—concurrent with drawing, photography and videography—that seek to express the affects (immaterial harmonics) latent in postindustrial landscapes. He coordinates and teaches design studios in the Department of Architecture at Iowa State University, and is the founder of Black Contemporary, a field station dedicated to the study of perception and atmosphere. Published July, 2018. BIOgraphies