'T' Space Virtual Exhibition Opening Celebration

 ‘T’ Space Rhinebeck is pleased to present a new body of work by the interdisciplinary collective Lead Pencil Studio. The exhibition will open with a live-streamed virtual event on Saturday, August 21 at 3PM with a guided walkthrough of the exhibition by Lead Pencil Studio accompanied by a poetry reading by Lisa Robertson and a concert by Lester St. Louis. 

The exhibition can be visited on the ‘T’ Space online viewing platform and will feature video, photography, models, LIDAR-based animations, and drawing that further expand on the concepts behind the show. Working out of Seattle since 1997, Lead Pencil Studio has continually advanced new territories of spatial inquiry with an outstanding body of original research, writing, teaching, installations, exhibitions, video, public policy, and civic artworks at an enormous range of scales. The work of this collaborative defines the mission of ’T’ Space to draw attention to individuals working fluidly across artistic and humanistic disciplines, and reflect on future architectures. 

Lead Pencil Studio presents Suspended Collapse, a new and exploratory body of work, that expands the aesthetic of structures which exist at the limits of perception and structural fidelity. Employing models, drawing, photography, and LiDAR-based animations, this new body of work probes a subject overlooked and under-explored in the field of architecture. With projects and proposals that exhibit qualities ordinarily defined as weak, frail, near-collapse, ephemeral, peripheral, and barely perceptible, these spatial explorations propose a counterpoint to the strength, solidity, and certainty that define the inherited traditions of Western architecture. 

The collaborative describe their creative output as “an exploration of the aesthetic and social qualities of constructed space stripped of utilitarian function. We are primarily interested in the delicate periphery at the beginnings of spatial demarcation, the gestures that fence or contain constructed space. We find ourselves drawn to the perceptual limits of space and understanding the physical and mental influence that minimal gestures exert on human behavior.” In this era of material scarcity and human-driven environmental change, Lead Pencil Studio’s lightweight constructions and underlying observations on contemporary practice could not be timelier. 

The Virtual Opening Event will feature a musical performance of Lester St. Louis, a poetry reading by Lisa Robertson, along with the guided walk-through of the exhibition by Lead Pencil Studio. The event will be anchored by a discussion between the artists about cross-inspiration between their disciplines and questions from the audience.

Lester St. Louis will perform an experimental concert complementing Lead Pencil Studio’s work, utilizing cello and electronic sound to create a meta-instrument sonic palette. Working in improvisation and his contemporary compositions, Lester St. Louis’s cello works are rooted in practices of real time synthesis and flow. The artist will perform in conversation with the unique architectural spaces—wood and glass spheres—in architect Steven Holl’s esteemed Ex of IN House on our ‘T’ Space Reserve. 

The New York City-based artist has performed internationally throughout North America, South America, Europe, and China with Jaimie Branch Fly or Die, Dré Hočevar, MOCREP, TAK Ensemble, SZA, and more. As a composer he has been commissioned by the JACK Quartet, RAGE THORMBONES, Jenniffer Koh, String Noise, and others.

Poet and essayist 

Lisa Robertson will read at the Opening Celebration. Lisa Robertson’s work includes Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, essays with points in

common with Lead Pencil Studio. Robertson says: “If architecture is the language of concrete and steel, then Soft Architecture … is about civic surface and natural history. It’s about social space, clothing, urban geography, visual art and the intersection of all these.” Soft Architecture exists at the crossroads of poetry, theory, urban geography and cultural criticism, some place where the quotidian and the metaphysical marry and invert.

Born in Toronto, Lisa Robertson currently lives in rural France and frequently travels to teach and lecture. Lisa Robertson is the author of numerous books of poems, including 3 Summers (Coach House Books, 2016) and R’s Boat (University of California Press, 2010). Her published works of prose essays include Nilling (2012).

Lead Pencil Studio is the working name of the art and architecture collaborative founded in 1997 by Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo. Han and Mihalyo collaborate and pursue installation art, site-specific art, and functional architecture. They are winners of the 2007 Founder’s Rome Prize in Architecture from the American Academy in Rome, and were recognized in 2006 as one of the ‘Emerging Voices’ by the Architectural League of New York. Their practice is self-described as “architecture in reverse…our projects are everything about architecture with none of its function…spaces with no greater purpose than to be perceived and question the certainty posited by the man-made world.”

About ‘T’ Space ‘T’ Space, located in the woodlands of Rhinebeck, NY, is an arts organization focused on education, design and ecology. Founded in 2010 by the Steven Myron Holl Foundation, ‘T’ Space has grown to become a vital center for the arts, nature and humanism in its region of the Hudson Valley. We offer a 30-acre nature preserve where visitors can view and engage with sculptural installations, experimental architecture, a new architectural archive and research library, and art exhibitions, poetry readings and musical performances by international and emerging artists.