Bernie Miller, 72” x 50” 2005
digital image on archival paper.
Blind Architect Apparatus (fragment)
Blind Architect Apparatus
"Architecture Parallax: Audio Jokes"
the guide museum telephones done at the Tapies Foundation.
44” x 62.5” digital image on archival paper.
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Alexander Pilis lives in Barcelona Spain. He is an un-disciplined and
de-disciplined architectural investigator, working under the aegis of
“Architecture Parallax.” It is a research praxis that poses
questions, how to think, articulate, and represent an ordering system
that is not dependent upon a visual singularity.
At the Peak Gallery Pilis presents a multi-media project exploring
issues about “the blind” as a critique of the modernization
of vision. The installation brings together three bodies of work; a
series of posters that serve as a conceptual story board (or, advertising)
for Pilis’ T.B.A. feature film “The Blind Architect”;
a video interview with June Bretherton (who is legally blind), which
explores our senses, inaccessible realities and visual crisis; and a
video wherein “The Blind Architect meets Rembrandt.”
“How do we see, what do we see and what do we think we are
seeing?” As an academically trained architect, architecture has
always informed my art and studio practice. In effect, art “allows
me” to explore the important social connection between people
– citizens - and built environments, and how people/citizens learn
to use them. “Practical” architecture does of course take
social planning into account, but it cannot predict the everyday use
of the built environment, nor can it interpret. As an artist-architect
I can ask these questions and can use the built environment –architecture
– as the starting point for research.
The Blind Architect is a continuation of this visual research, a form
of cultural meta-fiction or story-telling: It is, in effect the storyboard
for a film, as all good “speculative” films have a fairy
tale quality. The question in simple terms is, What does the blind architect
see?” Naturally, this is an impossibility, so the photographs
that make up The Blind Architect series are portraits –friends
and colleagues posing, acting and role-playing, as actors do in their
cinematic roles. The photographs have to work as art; one must bring
the same willing suspension of belief to them as when watching a film
or play. If there is no architecture “to be seen” it doesn’t
mean that the viewer cannot think about it. Humour is an important ingredient
in these works. There’s not a lot of humour in architecture, but
that doesn’t mean that architects are humour-challenged.
Alexander Pilis |
