The Archaeology of Architecture is an installation created for a group exhibition at the Art & Design Gallery of The Fashion Institute of Technology in NYC. Entitled “Picturing Space: Artists Imagine Architecture”, the exhibit brought together artists, exhibition designers and interior designers responding to the constructed city.

This work speaks to paradoxes inherent in urban structure: past and present; presence and absence; solid and void; fragility and sturdiness; permanence and mutability. I view these paradoxes through the layered lens of archaeology. The floor component of the lobby installation shows layers of density, translucency and transparency to reveal in varying degrees architecture no longer in existence, buried beneath traces of transition. The suspended component represents the new, but still, just another layer. I examine those layers as representative of human activity. If we dig deeply enough, all that remains of that activity are the remnants of architecture and the artifacts of behavior within those lost structures. When I look at the architecture in my “place”, New York City, I see an illusion of permanence. Rather than a complete building, I perceive bits of shape, color, light, space and activity – much of which occurs in the process of building or demolishing. I employ architecture as an armature, a shaky framework to help me depict what is not seen, the voids of history, the ever-changing present and the future. Time.

Floor section: Masonite, Homasote, Encaustic, ink, Plexiglas, acrylic cubes, archival ink on Silkjet transparencies, fabric, glass, wood, gaffers tape, 72” x 52” x 10 ½”

Airspace, 58 ½ “

Suspended Tower: Yupo, dichroic film, translucent film, Black Tyvek, UV Facade Tyvek, duct tape, artist tape, steel ,135” x 18 ½ ” x 18 ½ ”

CORA JANE GLASSER

CORA JANE GLASSER