University of Winnipeg and downtown community newspaper
University of Winnipeg and downtown community newspaper
Part of the 2024 Media Arts + Technology Residency
It is our pleasure to present new work by Lawrence Bird, part of the Media Arts + Technology Residency that is on going and will be showing from March 15 – May 31, 2024.
‘drawing Room Artist Statement
‘drawing Room explores aspects of “Withdrawal”, the last stage of VP’s Mid-life Crisis™ to be explored this year. The project deploys an array of moving images, audio, screens and technological remnants to collapse the distance between architecture and media, imagining Poolside gallery as a ground zero for future growth - expanding outward into adjacent spaces in Artspace, the city, and the world.
The project aims to provoke interference between artifacts from the past (VP's media and material archive) and its present, in a mutual deconstruction of media and architecture. Spreading across the second floor of Artspace, it represents not exactly a withdrawal from Poolside Gallery, but perhaps the development of a non-exclusive relationship with new surfaces made available by the centre’s expansion. The installation inserts into this mix work from all the decades of VP's existence representing the imagination,construction, destruction, and reconstruction of spaces.
Without imitating it, the installation also “draws” on an architectural forerunner: John Soane’s house, where historical artifacts – the media of their time - deconstruct an architect’s home into an array of fragments: walls, ceilings, mirrors, windows, staircases, passageways and moving panels. “Drawing” on VP’s archive, the installation becomes a “ ’drawing room” – a term from Soane’s time, the room to which visitors would withdraw to converse, consider, and contemplate.
The project intersects these histories and futures with the act of “drawing”, tracing a line in the representation of space, of rooms, and of the city. It’s a basic gesture of mediation, and the first act in “making room”.
Happy to crash my own mid-life crisis into VP’s.