Architects’ passion for wood makes gallery debut
JOHN BENTLEY MAYS
Published Thursday, Nov. 27 2014, 10:38 AM EST
In 2012, the small
Toronto research and design office of Williamson Chong (WC) won the Canada
Council’s prestigious $50,000 Professional Prix de Rome in Architecture with an
engaging and very Canadian proposal.
Their project: to study
the new things that European and Asian architects, engineers, building
technologists and craftsfolk are doing with forest products. WC principals
Shane Williamson, Betsy Williamson and Donald Chong wanted to see first-hand,
for example, how builders elsewhere are using cheap, renewable wood to handle
the job of heavy structural lifting that’s been done, so far, almost
exclusively by stone, steel and concrete. They wanted to look into the future
of wood, a sustainable resource that Canada has, of course, in magnificent
abundance.
To celebrate the end of
WC’s two-year harvesting of ideas and practical strategies, Toronto gallerist
Jane Corkin last week opened Living Wood, a show of the studio’s works that
fans of both architecture and high-tech art will appreciate.
Don’t expect to see
images or examples of the super-strong wooden girders the team spent much of
their time inspecting. The structural muscle of wood, and the buildings now
being designed with wood’s strengths in mind, would certainly be interesting
topics for an exhibition – but they are not what this one is about. Instead,
WC’s installation of sculpted forms and prints – “gallery art,” as opposed to
models or plans, “totally on the subjective side,” Ms. Williamson says – is a
tribute to wood’s beauty and malleability, and to the expressive lyricism that
wood, trees and forests have inspired in poetry, art and architecture since antiquity.
The centrepiece in Ms. Corkin’s Distillery
District space, for example, is a 200-square-foot mural composed of 288 tiles
of warm Ontario white maple, and titled Tracings, Serere 1-41 (2014).
Each square was hollowed out by a computer-driven router that left a little
circular, stepped depression resembling, more than anything else I can think
of, a terraced Greek amphitheatre. (The incisions are meant by the architects
to recall tree rings.) No two wooden tiles are exactly alike.
Viewed from a short distance away, as a
similarly grand-sized painting should be seen, the composition resolves itself
into a glowing expanse of subtly shifting lights and shadows, like a dappled
forest floor. Tracings is something
architecture can be, and should be more often than it is: a demonstration of
advanced cybernetic gadgetry at the service of quietly personal (but not
heroically individual) imagination and image-making.
Like Tracings, the group
of four handsome ink-jet prints on archival paper called Origins: Sheer, Gently, Upland, Graded (2014) is a
result of the closely collaborative thinking about wood and technology that has
gone on in the WC office over the past couple of years.
To make each, WC first
laid out a computer-generated, two-dimensional grid of tiny circles
(incidentally, the basic symbols for trees in architectural plans) in virtual
space, then subjected this surface to various foldings, distortions and
compressions. These hand-made stresses and “tunings” of the grid, made visible
in the prints, have produced abstract patterns or traces much like those of
wood-grain – strongly rhythmic in one instance, delicate as sheer fabric in
another, as rugged as a landscape of eroded hills and gullies in yet another.
Framing and
complementing WC’s Living Wood is a second exhibition in the Corkin Gallery,
this one called On Architecture and Structure. While this title strikes the ear
as academic and stuffy, the actual work Ms. Corkin has put into it is anything
but.
The photos, paintings
and works on paper by 11 artists featured here hail from the borderline where
ordinary objects, human and natural, become symbolic, charged with remarkable
meaning. The forest trees beautifully photographed in black and white by
Thaddeus Holownia, for instance, grow in the vicinity of Walden Pond, a
Massachusetts puddle made famous by the philosopher and social critic Henry
David Thoreau, who lived there for two years. Mr. Holownia’s images portray the
living witnesses of Mr. Thoreau’s visit 150 years ago, and serve as modest monuments
to the author’s idealistic, durably influential experiment in simple living
beyond the city’s edge.
Green nature makes
another, very different appearance – this time as a force in active conflict
with urban civilization – in American artist Chad Gerth’s aerial photos of
Chicago’s vacant lots. These places have been bulldozed, worn down to dirt by
the sneakers of playing kids and by short-cutters, used as garbage dumps,
abandoned. Despite neglect and abuse, however, Mr. Gerth’s empty spaces are
surprisingly green. Living nature, we city folk are reminded, is persistent,
ready to retake whatever ground becomes available, be it ever so forsaken from
a human point of view.
Living Wood and On Architecture and Structure
continue at the Corkin Gallery, 7 Tank House Lane in the Distillery District,
through Dec. 30.
