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McEwen wins Graham Foundation Grant for exhibition

McEwen wins Graham Foundation Grant for exhibition

The Graham Foundation announced that Assistant Professor V. Mitch McEwen and Farzi Lotfi-Jam, Taubman College 2013-14 Sanders Fellow, have won a grant for their exhibition, Methexis: The Algorithmic Recitative.

This collaboration digitally connects two exhibitions occurring simultaneously on two different continents featuring work by the Detroit-based A(n) Office—one at the US Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale titled The Architectural Imagination, and the other at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MoCAD) called Methexis. Both exhibitions present recent design work sited in Detroit: the Venice exhibition displays the firm’s speculative project for a ten-acre site in Detroit’s Mexicantown, exploring architecture’s capacity to re-form the adjacency between industry and the urban core; similarly, the MoCAD exhibition offers a series of design studies that reimagine processes of demolition and preservation, specifically focusing on the tens of thousands of vacant houses in Detroit built in the early twentieth century. Driven by a shared interest in projects that query the impact of digital technology on the body and the built environment, McEwen’s and Lotfi-Jam’s interactive virtual reality experience stages a virtual Venice and a virtually reimagined Detroit. Kinetic, immersive display techniques operate as perceptual devices on the body, guiding visitors on multiple routes through the virtual world and the gallery floor.

The Graham Foundation 2016 grants support 59 innovative projects engaging original ideas in architecture. Among the funded projects are exhibitions, publications, films, live performances, and site-specific installations. These diverse projects advance new scholarship, fuel creative experimentation and critical dialogue, and expand opportunities for public engagement with architecture and its role in contemporary society.

To see the entire group of grantees: http://grahamfoundation.org/grantees/