Luis Urculo’s work is characterized by an unusual portrayal of architecture in the form of illustrations, animations, installations, and interiors. He studied at the ETSAM Madrid, at the Illinois Institute of Technology Chicago and at the Institute of Design and has collaborated with Alberto Campo Baeza, Mansilla-Tuñon and Izaskun Chinchilla. In 2006, he opened his own studio developing ephemeral architecture projects, stage designs and video-installations for Conde Nást, Philippe Starck and Sybilla, among others. His work has been exhibited at the XI Bienale di Architettura di Venezia, Montevideo Bienial, COAM Foundation and other locations. He also works as a teacher with Jaime Hayón for Master of European Design Labs at Instituto Europeo di Design, Madrid.

Lecture is free but RSVP is required.

Reflecting upon the broader cultural milieu, as well as their own work, the panel will discuss how the influences of democracy, capitalism, and globalization have defined contemporary Central European society and culture. They will also address how these forces have impacted the design of the built environment and shaped the generation of artists born after the fall of the Berlin wall.

Janeil Engelstad (USA) is an artist, curator and educator who, working independently and collaboratively, produces exhibitions and projects throughout the world. In 2009 she produced Voices From the Center: Central Europeans Reflect on Life Before and After the Fall of The Berlin Wall, a multiform project that stemmed from her experience as a Fulbright Scholar at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava, Slovakia.

Oto Hudec (SK) is a visual artist whose work includes exhibitions and installations in public spaces that examine immigration, refugees, the rights of indigenous people, and the impact of globalization upon the natural environment. His work has been exhibited throughout the world and was featured in the 2009 Bienal Mercosul in Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Magda Stanová (SK) is a visual artist whose interest lays in urban development, cartography, analysis of creative processes, theory of photography, and history of ownership. In 2008, her book W cieniu fotografii was published by Foundation for Visual Arts in Krakow, Poland and in 2009, she was nominated for the Discovery Award in Rencontre d’Arles festival in France.

Miklós Surányi (HU) is a Budapest based photographer whose images paint an intimate portrait of Hungarian society and culture. He has exhibited throughout Europe and Asia and his work has been published in several Hungarian publications, including limited edition portfolios published by Budapest’s Lumen Gallery.

Matej Vakula (SK) is an artist and curator working in a variety of media, often using public space as a vehicle to explore how the political becomes personal, the personal becomes political, and the politics of site. His work has been exhibited throughout Europe and the United States and has been featured in Art Forum and other media outlets.

Jan Worpus (PL) is a principle at Grafixpol, a design studio based in ?ód?, Poland that works in a variety of mediums and formats to create digital and printed materials that convey the ideas, emotions and essence of society and culture. Grafixpol designed the interactive website for Voices From the Center.

The talk will highlight resonances between some of Stratman’s recent (and future) projects and that of Nancy Holt. In particular, the recent public installations “Desert Resonator” and “Augural Pair,” (collaborations with artist Steven Badgett), and the in-progress “Sinkholes” project. Nancy Holt: Sightlines will be on view at the Graham Foundation from October 7 through December 17, 2011.

Deborah Stratman is a Chicago-based artist and filmmaker interested in landscapes and systems. Her films, rather than telling stories, pose a series of problems – and through their at times ambiguous nature, allow for a complicated reading of the questions being asked. Many of her films point to the relationships between physical environments and the very human struggles for power, ownership, mastery and control that are played out on the land. Most recently, they have questioned elemental historical narratives about freedom, expansion, security, and the regulation of space. Stratman works in multiple mediums, including photography, sound, drawing and sculpture. She has exhibited internationally at venues including the Whitney Biennial, MoMA, the Pompidou, Hammer Museum and any international film festivals including Sundance, the Viennale, Ann Arbor and Rotterdam. She is the recipient of Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships and she currently teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Presented in conjunction with the exhibition Nancy Holt: Sightlines.

Since the late 1960s, Nancy Holt has created a far-reaching body of work, including films, videos, site-specific installations, artist’s books, concrete poetry, and major sculpture commissions. Nancy Holt: Sightlines, which includes documentation from more than 40 projects, showcases the artist’s early films, videos, and related pieces from 1966 to 1980, pivotal works which transform how we perceive landscape through the use of different observational modes. Featured in the exhibition are Holt’s film Sun Tunnels (1978), which documents the creation of her well-known site-specific work of the same name, and Pine Barrens (1975), a meditative documentary about a notoriously vast, undeveloped region in central New Jersey. Other highlights in the exhibition include Swamp (1971, in collaboration with Robert Smithson), Locating #2 (1972), Boomerang (1973, in collaboration with Richard Serra), Points of View (1974), a four-monitor installation, and Revolve (1977), alongside materials from early moments in Holt’s career that have been selected from the artist’s archive, which has only recently become available for exhibition and study.

Nancy Holt was born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1938 and raised in New Jersey. In 1960, she graduated from Tufts University. Shortly after, she moved to New York, where — alongside a group of colleagues and collaborators including Michael Heizer, Carl Andre, Eva Hesse, Richard Serra and Robert Smithson — she began working in film, video, installation and sound art. With her novel use of cylindrical forms, light, and techniques of reflection, Holt developed a unique aesthetics of perception, which enabled visitors to her sites to engage with the landscape in new and challenging ways.

Holt is the recipient of five National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, two New York Creative Artist Fellowships and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Tate Modern in London, and elsewhere.

For more information, please visit http://grahamfoundation.org/public_exhibitions/3983-nancy-holt-sightlines

This performance is presented in partnership with Lampo.

Here is Hecker’s predicament: it may be impossible to create a rational presentation of hyperchaos because hyperchaos may not be experienceable. While any composition has a finite duration, “hyperchaos is a theory of time, a theory to show that time is not becoming,” as Meillassoux puts it, which we understand as a sort of continuity or reference to the infinite nature of the universe. And, achieving real disorder is impossible anyway, “because disorder is just another form of order than the one you expect,” where fast-moving sound is a cliché of randomness and merely another form of organization…

His performance delivers a perfect combination of theoretical underpinning and drop-dead digital disorientation.

This performance is presented in partnership with Lampo.

Eames Demetrios believes that, along with art and film, design is a process of discovery. By examining Emeco and Frank Gehry’s Super Light chair, the Six Pound Chair reveals the inner workings of this process.

Glenn Murcutt is Australia’s most internationally recognized architect. In 1992 he was awarded the Gold Medal of the Australian Institute of Architects; in 1996 he was awarded the Order of Australia (AO); in 2002 he received the Pritzker Prize, considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for architecture; and in 2009 he was awarded the Gold Medal of the American Institute of Architects. The short film Architecture For Place was made to accompany a touring exhibition of Murcutt’s work.

In 1969 world-renowned architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown designed the world’s first pop-art house. Forty years later, when the couple learned that their brainchild would be demolished, they enlisted their son, Jim, and friend and colleague, Fred Schwartz, to save the house. Saving Lieb House documents the 97-mile journey of the house from Barnegat Light, NJ through the rough waters of the Atlantic, under the Verrazano Bridge, past crowds of cheering New Yorkers, the Statue of Liberty, and the Brooklyn Bridge, to its new home in Glen Cove, New York.

James Venturi is a filmmaker and owner of Light From Light Films (LFLF). Venturi is currently working on, Learning from Bob and Denise, a documentary on the architecture and ideas of his parents, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown. Learning from Bob and Denise was supported by two grants from the Graham Foundation in 2006 and 2009.

Demonstrating this vision at work is a selection of drawings, models, and other documentation of past projects, including: City Tower (with Kahn, 1952-1957); Urban Hierarchy (1970); and the Four-Poster House (1971-1974). There are also examples of Tyng’s publications and research, which investigate Jungian cycles, city squares, and the cosmos. Throughout, geometry is both rational and expressive, as much a means of contemplation as of calculation and construction.

In 1965, Anne Tyng was one of the first women to receive a fellowship from the Graham Foundation for her project Anatomy of Form: The Divine Proportion in the Platonic Solids. In her research she developed a theory of hierarchies of symmetry—symmetries within symmetries—and a search for architectural insight and revelation in the consistency and beauty of all underlying form.  A portion of this research was published in the article Geometric Extensions of Consciousness in the Italian architectural journal Zodiak #19 in1969.

“Tyng’s ideas, supported by the Graham Foundation over 45 years ago, resonate deeply with contemporary architects who are working with complex geometry as a source for new forms in building,” notes Sarah Herda, Director of the Graham Foundation. “She was at the forefront of experimentation in the field, and this exhibition introduces her work to new generations who are also working to push the spatial potential of architecture.”

Talk by Stanislaus von Moos.

In 1995, Mackey created Worker, Inc. with the intention of bridging the social sciences, planning, architecture, and art. In 2007, he created the Neighborhood Residents Resources Ethnography Studies Unit, a division of Worker, Inc., to understand local physical environments with an emphasis on data. He conducts on-the-ground research and displays it in small pamphlet publications that combine language, humor, pen and ink drawing, ethnographic research, and graphic arts into a concise and finely executed document that offers a fresh, and often surprising, perspective on human environments. Mackey received a 2010 grant from the Graham Foundation for his Field Guides and Checklists series.

Since 1969, Mackey has had 19 different addresses, 23 bedrooms, 10 pets, 15 jobs, played 25 different sports, ingested 20 types of drugs, had 9 surgeries, been to 2 counselors, visited 16 countries, enjoyed listening to 7 genres of music, tried to play 4 musical instruments, received 3 college degrees, owned 7 bicycles, 4 automobiles and 3 golf carts.

Las Vegas Studio: Images From the Archives of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown is organized by The Museum im Bellpark, Kriens and is curated by Hilar Stadler and Martino Stierli.