Professor: Jeff Halstead
As a continuation of “Animate Inanimate,” “Rooms with a View” is a series of explorations regarding encasement in and as the environment. The objects and homes have been rendered with wax and plastic materiality to further illustrate the condition of the encasement. These two materials have been selected as a compliment to one another. This idea of encasement is an extension of Jeff Koons’s vitrines and spins off of Jacques Tati’s method of staging and world-making in his film Playtime. The methodology for constructing the homes is based on taking domestic qualities of modernism and postmodernism and re-appropriating their facades by folding, sculpting, and mixing. This process mixes the familiar with the unfamiliar. This idea of familiarity continues as the interior rooms are staged and showcased within vitrines. The plastic objects occupy the space in a curated manner that can only exist as a displayed scene. This presentation space is now more than a room and is an example of the perfection of retail display. Similar to an experience at IKEA in which every object on display looks beautiful when staged together, but when the objects are separated, they lose the glamour that existed when playing a part in the composition as a whole. Exploration continued by investigating the difference between the digital vitreous versus the physical vitreous once the studio began to marry digital models with the physical.
