Current Exhibition
“Time-Based Architecture ” by Karen Brummund
On view: August 6–September 26, 2010 at Visual Studies Workshop Gallery, 31 Prince Street

First Friday event on August 6, 2010 6-9PM with a Drawing Mob/Sketch Crawl event in connection with Rochester Contemporary Art Center

Gallery hours: Thursday, 5-8 pm, Friday-Sunday, 12-5 pm
All events are free and open to the public

Architecture defines public space and artist Karen Brummund will be radically altering the local environment in Rochester, NY with a dynamic outdoor installation about the passage of time. For the exhibition “Time-Based Architecture,” Brummund will be installing directly on the façade of Visual Studies Workshop’s ca. 1913, two-and-one-half story stone building. Last year VSW entirely removed the ivy from its historic edifice, once the woman’s dormitory for the University of Rochester. The piece 31 Prince Street entails Brummund creating one digitally scaled image printed on hundreds of sheets of paper in puzzle-like fragments that she will temporarily adhere directly to the building surface. Exploring the removed ivy both as a bygone symbol of prestige and a physical force of nature, the paper image fragments in Brummund’s weather-exposed installation will fall, pile on the ground, and blow away causing the presence of the piece to change over time. An outdoor webcam video feed will also be projected in VSW’s 31 Prince Street gallery space along with an accompanying exhibition essay by Patricia Phillips and other documentation and education materials to illuminate Brummund’s project. Phillips writes that, “Brummund has developed a series of temporary installations that examine and expose our perception and experience of actual space through puzzling and phantom-like interventions.”

The public can interact with Brummund’s work through a Drawing Mob or Sketchcrawl organized in connection with Rochester Contemporary Art Center’s annual State of the City exhibition also opening August 6, 6-10 pm. Contribute to the State of the City Exhibition and participate in drawing as a way to think about community, architecture and urban issues. As part of the crawl, go to Visual Studies Workshop on opening night where the artist will be providing paper to sketchcrawlers. Participants will be encouraged (but not required) to add their drawings to the State of the City Exhibition. Open to anyone, you do not have to be an experienced artist to contribute.

ARTIST KAREN BRUMMUND is interested in ideas about drawing, architecture, time, and space. She is often commissioned to create interventions on buildings and in communities creating time-based drawings of architecture through photocopies, drawings, or videos of the building that cover the building itself. In Brummund's work the real and the represented intertwine to question our perception of the environment. Her interest is in finding the uncertain spaces between the place and time, the paper and the building, or the artist and the audience. Photographs and videos of these interventions have shown in galleries such as The Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, New York (2008) and the East End Film Festival in London, England (2007).

ESSAYIST PATRICIA PHILLIPS is Dean of Graduate Studies at Rhode Island School of Design. Phillips is an active researcher and critical writer on contemporary and public art, architecture and design, landscape, sculpture, and the ways these areas intersect. Her essays and reviews have been featured in Artforum, Art in America, Sculpture and Public Art Review, and Flash Art for the past thirty years. Phillips has curated and organized exhibitions for such institutions as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Queens Museum of Art, and the Institute for Contemporary Art/P.S.1 amongst others.

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