Gallery Hotel Installation
Optic - Rm 635
I was one of 16 finalists that were flown to Singapore to compete in the 2005 Creative Youth Exchange, an Asia-Pacific Design workshop and competition. I was given a 3D canvas in the form of a hotel room. I wanted to install an ‘art experience’ in this hotel room that was to push the boundaries on the concept of what has been termed in the last thirty years as the ‘designer hotel’. My aim was to cover every surface of the room in a black and white optical grid, in order to create a room that challenged the function of space, and broke down the form of it, whereby the space ceased to be four walls and a ceiling; a box structure, and instead became more fluid, where you couldn’t identify the verticality of the walls, where they connected to each other and to the ceiling.
Defining Boundaries - Rm 405
I was offered a 2nd hotel room to further develop my ideas in breaking down architectural form. The execution of this piece was done in collaboration with Eugene Tan. We had to carefully consider the room we had been given because spatially it was inconsistent and disjointed. We wanted to redefine the structural boundaries of the space and unify the shapes so that it was more connected. What we achieved was a wrapping of the room interior, where straight lines started from a focal point and followed the interior planes, they wrapped over furniture and anything in its path.
In the three distinct areas of the room we created three focal points as a way of unifying it. The contradiction or binary oppostition is that the lines unifiy but also disect. This effect of fragmentation was added to further by the reflection in the curved window which segmented that which it was reflecting. The installation can be seen as four white walls and a ceiling, but it can also be perceived as being part of a larger matrix of grids and vectors. We created a shift in perception so that the space was able to be looked at differently.