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Image 1 of 1
Image 1 of 1
Image 1 of 1
Artist: Trudi Lynn Smith & Kate Hennessy
Artwork Title: Slag Concrete Block (the Bauhaus Building in Dessau)
Year Created: 2019
Medium: Risograph print with white wood frame
Dimensions: 13×15” Finished
Edition: 1
Artist Statement:
This image shows a three-colour rendering of a slag concrete hollow block, made from a photograph found in the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation’s construction research archive. The block is weathered, an imperfect form chipped away at through the relational work of structure and insulation, conflict, reuse, and repair.
The risograph is an offset ink printing machine notorious for unpredictability and imperfection and misalignments of cyan, magenta, and yellow layers when making a color copy. Working with this machine we co-created misaligned risograph images to unbind the building and archive from a narrative of stability and permanence.
While the block exists as part of the archive of the building, as a material artifact it reveals the way that the Bauhaus ideal was always fugitive. Symbolizing the beginning of industrialized construction where the form is imagined to be repeatable and static, the risograph suggests that the Dessau building, envisioned by Walter Gropius as a manifesto of the Bauhaus ideal, exists as an entropic fugitive archive that is as precarious as it is iconic.
Artist: Trudi Lynn Smith & Kate Hennessy
Artwork Title: Slag Concrete Block (the Bauhaus Building in Dessau)
Year Created: 2019
Medium: Risograph print with white wood frame
Dimensions: 13×15” Finished
Edition: 1
Artist Statement:
This image shows a three-colour rendering of a slag concrete hollow block, made from a photograph found in the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation’s construction research archive. The block is weathered, an imperfect form chipped away at through the relational work of structure and insulation, conflict, reuse, and repair.
The risograph is an offset ink printing machine notorious for unpredictability and imperfection and misalignments of cyan, magenta, and yellow layers when making a color copy. Working with this machine we co-created misaligned risograph images to unbind the building and archive from a narrative of stability and permanence.
While the block exists as part of the archive of the building, as a material artifact it reveals the way that the Bauhaus ideal was always fugitive. Symbolizing the beginning of industrialized construction where the form is imagined to be repeatable and static, the risograph suggests that the Dessau building, envisioned by Walter Gropius as a manifesto of the Bauhaus ideal, exists as an entropic fugitive archive that is as precarious as it is iconic.