Mara Jovanović

This project is interested in the potentials of surface, strung between the realms of the graphic and the tactile, to carry the political dispositions of a given space, and our ability to undermine them through simple gestures of copying and reorientation. Informed by this interest, I've taken the intricate molded ceiling of the Strand Theatre in Dorchester, which carries the semantic flavor of the theatre as a withdrawn and privileged domain, and made a bootleg of it which I set into the ground behind the theater, this time facing up, anticipating weather and feet. The new surface becomes an outdoor performance space for the theatre, as well as a lingering and gathering space for the neighborhood.

This project begins to explore the affordances of grain, understood both as a three-dimensional field permeating a material or space, as well as the two-dimensional image revealed by a cut into that field. Taking this binary as an inciting incident, it references anamorphic projection, and more broadly mirage, as ways image can override and pervert space. In a series of studies at different scales, the checkered cube, a representation of Cartesian unit grid space, is distressed through a set of cuts -- both controlled and intuitive -- at angles and with curvatures calibrated carefully in order to spawn strange and unexpected behaviors from a canonically normative field.