The Architectural Topographies project
An MFA Thesis Project, by Claudia Vieira
For me, geometry is poetry. The rectangle is a metaphor for empty space—enigmatic in its simplicity. I see it as what the Brazilian Spiral Room, Installation by Claudia Vieira artist Lygia Clark called empty-full. And, as a parallel to the concept of emptiness in Zen Buddhism. Art questions the nature and limits of the three-dimensional object and transcends physical presence to envelop vision, architecture and experience.
All of these ideas and more are expressed in my Architectural Topographies Project, completed during my graduate studies at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. It includes large drawings on paper,a drawing installation where drawings were made directly on the walls, ceiling and floor of three rooms—one black, another black and white (Spiral Room) and the third, white)—plus a video projection of the process of making of the installation.
The project in the Spiral Room turned into a kind of drawing meditation—one that took three months to complete. It was done right after a three-week Kyol Che retreat last summer at Providence Zen Center. The work was all black and white, using only line charcoal and ink. Among other influences, it relates to Geronimus Bosch's painting, Garden of Earthly Delights (ca. 1500, Museo del Prado, Madrid), which is both a triptych and a metaphor for darkness and lightness, but mainly for real life's non-duality, where both actually interact.
Drawing, as you might guess by now, is at the core of my practice. Its rigor and discipline function as a form of meditation, a concentration on an essential activity in which the credibility of the statement the artist is making is completely within his or her hands. Here, drawing is not an end product, but a process. One which reaches beyond the system of significance that is activated by the work and its interaction with the viewer that produces meaning. For me drawing is a medium for exploring, blurring and exploiting the dialectical separations between reality and imagination, visible and invisible, inside and outside, self and other.
Claudia’s project, her graduation thesis project for a Master of Fine Arts degree at Pratt Institute, was on display last December at the Institute.