CONSTRUCTED

CONSTRUCTED

Five Artists  Examine Our Built Environments, Their Communities and History

Full Circle is pleased to present CONSTRUCTED, a group exhibition of five artists showcasing work inspired by architecture and the built environment.

Architecture functions beyond a basic need for shelter and frequently reflects our own personal and collective identities. But these cultural associations and meanings are open to interpretation and change over time. In fact, as these five artists demonstrate, they are easily manipulated to become parts of artistic expression and thus whole new cultural statements.

Featuring photography, collage, assemblage, sculpture, and sound, CONSTRUCTED presents five artists: Graham Coreil-Allen, ​Khánh H. Lê, Mark Luthringer, D.S. Mangus, and James Singewald. These artists use photography and photographic work to celebrate and question our surroundings and their constructed meanings. All of the work in the exhibition are devoid of people but their presence is implied and captured not only through sound and research but also by the monuments of our own psyche.  

The photographs by Graham Coreil-Allen document the ongoing Druid Hill Park restoration project and its ramifications for the local community. While the project to comply with the EPA's 2006 Safe Drink Water Act is ultimately expected to benefit the city and the health of its residents, construction has significantly disrupted pedestrian access to the park. Coreil-Allen explores the question of how projects undertaken to advance collective goals affect individual residents. Accompanying his photographs is a “growing” sculpture made from found objects he picked up on his walks between his residence in Druid Hill and the gallery. 

Khánh H. Lê’s work probes his personal and family histories as a way of carving out a cultural identity for himself as a Vietnamese-born American artist. His piece in the show, a photo-sculpture of a city block paired with audio interviews of local residents, seeks to create a historical narrative reflecting the tensions found not only in his own identity, but in many other communities as well. Lê’s interviews of residents demonstrate that places and spaces can be fashioned in our image, remodeled for anyone, and that place does not have to dictate culture. 

Mark Luthringer’s mall rooflines uses an iterative approach to assemble a group of images that, when viewed as a grid, comment on the repetition, redundancy, and excess of our current age. These architectural gestures intended to create distinguishing features for shopping malls instead seem to demonstrate the futility of pursuing this goal, and of the limits of using architecture to forcibly manufacture a universal ‘culture.’

Photographer and writer D.S. Mangus presents photomontages in both 2D and 3D forms. Built from found objects, layered photos, and collaged digital fragments of construction and demolition sites, Mangus explores the parallels between architecture and his experience within his own body. Set in Boston and Baltimore, the images display both the life cycle of buildings and our own. 

James Singewald uses saturated film images to perform a building by building survey of blocks in Baltimore. Combining them with research, he seeks to attach stories and history to each facade he photographs. While these pictures are void of people, their implied presence is captured by preserving and archiving the voices of the past. 

Architecture is such a ubiquitous presence in our lives that we do not give much thought to how it affects us, what we need from it, and what it can mean to us. CONSTRUCTED presents 5 artists offering responses to these questions and also demonstrates the power of change that we all possess. Our spaces are passed down to us and while the memory should be preserved, age does not equate with correctness and universality.

Exhibition dates: January 11th - February 29th. 

Reception w/ Artists: January 25th, 5-8PM.

Featured Artists: Graham Coreil-Allen, ​Khánh H. Lê, Mark Luthringer, D.S. Mangus, and James Singewald