Pressure Buildings and Blackouts

Pressure Buildings and Blackouts was a site-specific installation that engaged Storefront’s gallery space, its façade and the street. Employing a technique he developed to cast concrete with fabric tension membranes, West created a series of sensual, organic concrete forms that flowed onto the street through specially-carved openings in the gallery’s façade. These experiments allude to an entirely new, unexplored territory of organic form in architecture that carrys with it the promise of less rigid built forms. For “Blackouts,” a series of drawings exhibited inside the gallery, West started with collages of found photographs that he then redrew by selectively blackening and erasing them. Obscuring the authority of the perspectival system, “Blackouts” suggested blindness and indeterminacy as a new way of seeing the world.