Architecture in Motion
Saturday, June 1, 2019 at 2pm
The former Fuller Manufacturing Building
3300 5th St NE
Minneapolis, MN 55418, USA
All FD13 events are free to attend. Reserve your free space here.
The structure, texture, and materials of clothing have continuously informed Diane Simpson’s sculptural practice over five decades. In her works, Simpson combines clothing designs with forms that reference architecture, exploring the sociological roles and styles of the clothes we wear and the buildings that surround us.
FD13 residency for the arts presents Architecture in Motion, a new performance by Chicago-based sculptor Diane Simpson developed in collaboration with Minneapolis-based choreographer Chris Schlichting. Working over an extended research period of nine months, Simpson has designed her first costumes to be animated by dancers in her very first performance work.
Her costumes take inspiration from the former Women’s City Club of St Paul, designed by architect Magnus Jemne in 1931 in the Art Deco style. This building has an impressive social and performative history, growing out of a post-World War I movement which emphasized women’s independence and new social roles as workers, volunteers, and persons more fully involved in society. The Women’s City Club were avid supporters of the arts bringing opera and theater companies to the Twin Cities, and notably Gertrude Stein, who spoke there in 1934.
Taking inspiration from the building’s history, Simpson’s costumes reference key elegant details of the building – the slick, silvery sheen of the front door; the mobius curve of a brass banister; the geometric grid of a lighting fixture in the former Woman’s Lecture Hall – translating these into sculptural costumes which simultaneously amplify and restrict the body.
In advance of the performance, Simpson and Schlichting will work intimately together to set the costumes in motion exploring what possibilities their pleasurable, yet rigid, architectural forms make possible. In their respective practices, both artists share a propensity for researching and combining disparate sources into new forms, an economy of decision making, and an affinity for structural investigation, making them ideal partners.
Essay:
Read Performance Ornament and Crime, an essay responding to the project by Ross Elfline, an art historian whose research focuses on radical architecture practices in Europe, America, and Japan that exist at the intersection of design and art. He teaches at Carleton College, Minnesota.
Supporters:
Supported by Nor Hall and Roger Hale, and Corbett vs Dempsey, Chicago. Special thanks to the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago for their generous support, via the Foundation’s Research and Development Grants to Individuals funding strand.
Diane Simpson’s work can also be seen in the coming weeks and months as part of the 2019 Whitney Biennial in NYC.
