Building

The structure of the drawings that make up Susan Hefuna’s Building was inspired by the act of walking through the gridded streets of New York City. Each of the work’s nine parts was completed at a single sitting by applying Indian ink to two layers of tracing paper. These layers interact with one another to establish a dialogue between abstracted geometric shapes in which angular and circular lines are incorporated into network-like designs. These are reminiscent of the matrices of horizontal and vertical lines that characterize modernist metropolitan architecture, and the complex latticework—which is both decorative and functional—of classical Islamic Mashrabiya window screens.