Imagination of Space, presented by The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, organized and curated by Ceren Bingol and Mauricio Higuera, is dedicated to the exploration and exhibition of projects in architecture, art, poetry, sound and performance. A series of residencies and exhibitions will feature professional and student artists, architects, poets and writers creating and collaborating on immersive work that celebrates imagination in space, ecology, form, light, sound and material. The project runs from June 1 through October 31, 2019. 

Exhibitions

Phenomenology of Space - June 1 through October 31
In an Advanced Concepts in Phenomenology of Space seminar taught by Ceren Bingol, 10 architecture students, Juan Cardona, Claudia D'Auria, Yoonsang Jo, Jisoo Kim, Jihoon Park, Karim Sabry, Jeremy Son, Maren Speyer, Tracy Tan and Brandy Vazquez, explore the intersection of poetics and architecture through a series of full scale installations and moveable objects inside the house. The projects reimagine and activate the physical constructed space and perceived emotional or metaphorical space, while enabling a collaborative discourse between professional and student creatives, and the public.

Descension - June 22 through July 14
Descension is an installation by Rebecca Ripple employing a collection of aerial views of clouds downloaded from the Internet and transferred onto sand bags forming a circle or barricade. Sand bags are tools for protection and isolation. They are used in war and natural disasters by the military and civilians. It is an inversion of the art historical depictions of the Assumption of Mary into heaven ("...having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory." - Pope Pius XII, 1950.) It is a perspective from a flying carpet... hovering and giving an overview. The Internet is also a way of traveling to new lands and experiencing without the bodily senses.

Rebecca Ripple (b. Huntington, New York) received her MFA from Yale University in 1995. She has exhibited throughout the United States and in Italy, at venues including Klowden Mann, the Los Angeles Museum of Art, Kristin Engle Gallery, Rosamund Felsen Gallery and the Brewery Project in Los Angeles, the Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, Tilt Gallery and Upfor Gallery in Portland, and many others. Her work has been featured in Sculpture Magazine, and reviewed in LA Weekly, Huffington Post, ArtScene, Artillery, Chicago Tribune, and American Craft. Ripple has attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, received multiple awards including a C.O.L.A. (City of Los Angeles Individual Fellowship) and a Nathan O. Freedman Endowment for Exceptional Creative Accomplishments Award. Her work has been featured in Sculpture magazine and reviewed in the Huffington Post, ArtScene, Artillery, and American Craft. She is the Artist in Residence of Sculpture at Cranbrook Academy of Art.

The Materials Encounters of Anna McDonald - June 15 through June 30
Downstairs: A collective process poem, a collaboration between architecture students Claudia D'Auria, Karim Sabry and Tracy Tan and poet Anna McDonald. We can all write it together. If you are at a loss, you can define a word. You can memorialize someone or something who is gone. You can write with a pen, or you can type on a typewriter. You can list some words that feel good in your mouth. Being is a process. We are processes. 

Upstairs: What if a collection were not published between two paper covers, but installed in a room? A room as a collection of work, held in space. These works are prose poems, city miniatures, feuilletons, micro scripts, encounters with the materials world in the spirit of Robert Wasler. 

Anna McDonald is a poet. She has published poetry in The New Yorker, Tin House, and The Paris Review and she has written prose features for The New York Times and New York Magazine. In January 2014, her eponymous chapbook was published by the artist Jason Dodge and his press, 500 places.

Night Visitors: Moth Prints - (July 1 through July 15)
This work pulls from a variety of sources, in particular, the natural world and the joy that comes from noticing the world around us. The series is inspired by the citizen science activity of 'mothing' or nocturnal light collecting to attract moths and insects and uses this framework to create fabric cyanotype exposures of the various species collected during a mothing session. The activity demonstrates biodiversity, and the project aims to share the dazzling beauty of moths while highlighting the importance of insects amidst the global insect population crisis. 

Ash Ferlito (b. 1979, San Bernardino, CA) lives and works in NYC. She is a graduate of the Tyler School of Art, Yale University and is a member of the Skowhegan Class of 2012. In 2015 she completed the DNA Residency in Provincetown, MA. She has also been awarded residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Cyprus College of Art. In 2014 she was a teaching artist in residence at UNLV.

The Light Lights | Space - (July 18 through August 31)
We perceive shapes under light. Light freely charges our perception of depth from a plane into a solid, the solid into a plane. The Light Lights | Space installation is about the intangible and varying experience from the reflection and shadow of light in space. With a thin layer of paper, light defines the shape itself and draws its boundary with the shadow in space. Reflections and shadows shown through the surface of the paper break down the boundaries of dimensional space, creating smooth and firm connections with it. 

Seonhee Sunny Kim is a visual creator who deals with tangible and intangible materials. Originally from Korea, her work is now based in Detroit and New York. She recently earned her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI, USA. This year she was selected as a recipient of New Beginning award by Mercedes Benz and she won the NYCxDesign emerging designer Award and the WantedDesign Launch Pad furniture competition during the 2019 NYC design week. She is currently collaborating with the City of Detroit on a lighting project for Detroit Community Center.

A-Museum of Quickroots (Un-Museo de Raices Movedizas) - (August 3 - August 31) 
A-Museum of Quickroots (“Raices Movedizas”) activates perceptions, stories, images, texts, and gatherings as iterations of a migrant museum. The project ignites places with the cultural and interpretive agency of an institution at the hands of collective effort. Against the backdrop of establishments that undocument migrant imaginations, Raices Movedizas is a witness. It documents these emergent imaginations through exhibitions, performances, and publications.  This iteration of Raices Movedizas is realized in collaboration by Myrna Lazcano, Mauricio Higuera (et al.), Pablo Mariano Diaz, Christian Hincapie, Clare Kambhu, Anderson Luna, Siara Mencia, Mandy Messina, Johnathan Payne and Maya Strauss. A reception on August 24 will include an outdoor installation of A-Museum along with performances and the invitation to picnic in the park. 

Mauricio Higuera is an artist and educator born in Medellin, Colombia in 1985. Now hyphenated-American and cognizant of the brutality of borders, he works through their vestiges to document the undocumented. His work is located at the threshold where the material and the immaterial coalesce. Mauricio holds a BFA in fine arts from The Cooper Union and a MFA in painting from Rutgers University. He has taught visual art at Rutgers University and The Cooper Union.