A B O U T F A C A D E
FACADE is an on-site installation. Using found objects and discarded cardboard, I am installing directly into the facade of the gallery, and along the front interior walls.
I use the term “facade” as literal term for the face of a building, and as the adverb, for the face we are putting on.
What I like about facades is that conceptually, I am not working with an empty shell- and what is outside is not always what is inside. People commonly say “it is what is on the inside that counts”, yet often in our society what we see is the facade, the mask people wear. This mask may endeavor to express either what we are inside, what we wish we were inside, or something else entirely. |
Beginning in 2015, I began working on a collection of relief cardboard sculptures that I have come to call The Facade Project. These sculptures referenced the faces of building that had been destroyed, torn-down, or otherwise altered in the neighborhood around my studio, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
As I worked on this series, I became inspired to integrate these facades into a performance that would reference the old Dutch Mustard Factory at 80 Metropolitan Avenue in Brooklyn, which had been demolished. I was strongly affected by the destruction of this building, and found myself moved on an emotional level by its absence from the everyday landscape of my environment. I arranged a performance, utilizing the choreography of a performer known as Sassy, to express the obliteration of the factory. Clad in the cardboard facades that morphed into both costume and mask, her movements were highlighted by projected footage of a wrecking ball colliding with buildings. This evolution in this facade series work, from facade relief to mask, recalls the tendencies of human cultures to preserve ancestral memories in masks and totems- from antiquity to the present day, these facades seek to preserve what no longer remains. It is in this spirit that I seek to capture and preserve that in my environment which has become ephemeral- a physical character, a time and a place that no longer exist, except in memory and in the facade artifacts of my work. |
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Lisa Ludwig’s Facade©2016 All Rights Reserved.
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