SCI-Arc Gallery | Los Angeles, CA

One of the most common details of contemporary architecture is barely visible, just a shadow. The gypsum board reveal has become the default detail to resolve the joint between walls, floors, ceilings, and apertures. It is pragmatic when providing an hard edge to finish the gypsum board and modern in its removal of decorative baseboards, moldings and trim pieces that conceal construction in more traditional architecture. But, the reveal also does something else aesthetically, it hyper-realizes the abstraction of the modern wall. The shadow line of the reveal produces walls that appear to float without any evidence of thickness or assembly. Walls as immaterial planes.

It is into these typical reveal details that we have jacked four different interventions. These intrusions disturb the assumed background of the modern abstract wall. With minimal modifications only on the reveals, it is no longer clear where a corner is, how thick a wall is, or what plane is in front of the other. The aesthetic effect is to defamiliarize the wall itself.

The construction also opens an estrangement of scale relations. From afar the piece appears as a fragment of typical construction. Up close, inside the gypsum board spaces, the appearance is of a finished interior with small scale details. It is at the middle distance between these two extremes that an unstable relation to scale becomes aesthetically triggered. The gap between the two scales is hard to maintain simultaneously making certain elements take on the abstract qualities of a scale model while other elements flip towards appearing too large. All this occurs even though every part of the construction is full scale. The wall becomes revealed as the abstract decoration that it is in reality.