The Dome Project

“I’d like to introduce myself as the world’s most successful failure.”  R. Buckminster FullerThis project intends to highlight the way in which an architectural landmark can come to symbolize both the search for and the loss of a potentially revolutionary and utopian moment in time.The installation is made up of two elements. The first is a series of three-dimensional models of geodesic domes which are constructed out of photographic images selected both from my own work over the past ten years as well as family archives. These constructed pieces offer a sculptural testimony to the past, to what is lost. The very act of construction is an act of reclamation, however fleeting.In addition to the sculptural element, the project includes audio interviews with a group of communards who built the world’s largest geodesic dome ever constructed by amateurs. These interviews are accompanied by a 30-minute video created from archival Super-8 footage taken between 1968 and 1972 by former members of this rural dome-building commune.The disjuncture between the video images and the audio interviews (recorded in 2003-2004) adumbrates the passage of time, the revisionist impulse, and ultimately the evanescence of the bohemian moment.

Seen in Paradox and Practice: Architecture in the Wake of Conceptualism University Art Gallery, UC Irvine January 2007 Curated By Juli Carson

As seen in Idiolects Angels Gate Cultural Center, San Pedro, CA, February 2005 curated by Roy Dowell and Annetta Kapon

As seen in Slouching Towards Bethlehem The Project, New York, NY, August 2004, curated by Jeffrey Usslip

As seen in The Politics of Memory Occidental College Los Angeles, CA, January 2003 curated by Nizan Shaked