A last-minute finishing touch. That gap was bothering me.
Steven Leyden Cochrane – Screen Wall Blocks (Window) (2012)
Water-jet cut foam rubber, site-adjusted installation
Window, Winnipeg, MB
Programmed by Derek Dunlop and J.J. Kegan McFadden
Project launch: Friday, May 4, 2012
Screen Wall Blocks (Window) is the first sculptural work in an ongoing series based on the pierced concrete bricks whose widespread use was a defining feature of mid-20th-Century suburban architecture. The piece consists of full-scale foam rubber replicas of designs manufactured since the 1950s by the A-1 Block Corporation of Orlando, Florida (near Tampa, where I grew up), arranged according to chance in this and future site-adjusted installations.
Neither fully “window” nor “wall,” the modular lattice speaks to ambivalences and contradictions central to my practice—those between private experience and public display, representation and objecthood, repetition and randomness. The piece playfully (and affectionately) debases Minimalist preoccupations with regular, industrially-produced materials and forms and, like much of my work, foregrounds my own wary nostalgia for sub-tropical suburbia.
