Triangle Arts Association is pleased to present “Architectural Cream,” an exhibition of new works by Astrid Busch and Claudia Weber highlighting our artist residency partnership with the Berlin Senate.

Astrid Busch’s works enter into a dialogue with real space; expanding and transforming it into the fictional. New narratives arise in the viewer’s head, in which reality and fiction lie side by side. In her works photography is not just a picture on the wall, it becomes an intervention or an architectural part of the room. Busch’s pictures, videos and installations are generated out of contrasts between light and darkness, functional and dysfunctional storytelling; between play and reality. For “Architectural Cream” she has created a site specific installation consisting of a wall-sized photograph and a video object. Herein the tangible exhibition space commingles with a fictive alternate reality. The settings were inspired by the atmosphere of the bare sheetrock and the unfinished, improvised architecture of DUMBO as well as the ambiguity between the potential and the ruined. The works construct a flow into one another and mutually influence this elusive space. Thus these ostensibly narrative spaces are ultimately transformed by their narrative emptiness into spaces for thought.

Claudia Weber’s photographic documentations of ephemeral assemblages create a dialectic between the raw physical presence of the materials she uses and the abstracted and aestheticized representationality of the images that result. Distilling them into pure form, Weber denaturalizes the cultural associations that have become attached to specific materials – particularly with regard to the built environment – by demonstrating the contingency of meaning upon context and correspondence. Her work for “Architectural Cream” was broadly inspired by the material and cultural transformations that have occurred in recent years in the DUMBO neighborhood, and specifically by the idea of the home decor showroom – a space that presents an array of samples in a fragmented manner intended to inspire the imaginations of customers preparing to remodel their living spaces. Names and texts attached to such samples often invoke the moods or aspirations that the products are meant to signify. Weber has utilized a diverse variety of materials – from fabrics and stones to coffee grounds and refined sugar – placing them into conversation with one another and thereby provoking shifts in their meaning or affectivity that range from the playful to the sublime.