In keeping with the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art’s mission to champion innovation in contemporary art, architecture and design, SMoCA launches a new series: Architecture + Art. This new programmatic series will invite architects to create site specific installations in response to the museum space and the specific environmental context of Scottsdale, Arizona. With Architecture+ Art, SMoCA aims to draw on important local and international architectural legacies. Building upon the success of past SMoCA projects such as the architecture competition and exhibition Flip-A-Strip and in the spirit of ongoing programs such as MoMA/P.S.1 Young Architects Program in New York or London’s Serpentine Gallery Pavilion, Architecture+ Art will offer a platform for architects to explore the boundaries of art and architecture and push forward the practice of architects working in the art museum setting.

SMoCA inaugurates the Architecture + Art series with 90 Days Over 100° by Phoenix-based architects Atherton | Keener. The collaborative team of Jay Atherton and Cy Keener focuses on creating meticulously researched built environments that expand the intersection of perception and time. These constructions merge static forms and changing phenomena with the sole intention of creating an opportunity to witness the unexpected. Atherton | Keener’s investigation of natural processes builds upon a long tradition, beginning with one of Arizona’s most noteworthy figures, artist James Turrell, and his examinations of light, space, celestial events and perception. They also draw from the temporal and aesthetic aspects of nature in the vein of Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson’s physically immersive theatrical representations of the natural within built environments, as well as architect/artist Maya Lin’s acute observations and incorporations of natural materials and geometries in her work.

For their installation at SMoCA, Atherton | Keener will assemble a temporary orchestration of frozen water and channeled sunlight within the context of Museum space over the summer in Arizona, where the temperatures regularly exceed 100° for over 90 days. The installation will explore temporal and physical qualities inherent in material phase change from solid to liquid. The piece will transform over the course of each day. Light intensity and color will evolve as water melts, drips and collects. The project aims to alert visitors to the relationship between water and electricity in this highly constructed desert environment.

ABOUT THE ARCHITECTS:
Atherton│Keener recently completed the Meadowbrook Residence, a structure that chronicles diurnal and seasonal changes in desert light, as they unfold on an urban site in Phoenix. The building is organized around three sculpted rooms, each opening to a different cardinal direction, and each protected by a diaphanous screen. Jay Atherton is fascinated by things unnoticed. The formative years of his youth transpired in the mountainous solitude of a Korean monastery. He has completed formal education in architecture, receiving degrees from Arizona State University, and The University of California, Berkeley and has worked under established practitioners in the US and Europe, including Studio Daniel Libeskind, Will Bruder Partners and Jones Studio. Cy Keener is intrigued by natural phenomena. He has ventured beyond a few of the remaining edges of the built environment into high granite peaks, glacial valleys, and forested slopes where the unmitigated can still be experienced. He has a degree in classics and philosophy from Colorado College, spent a year studying ancient philosophy at the University of Oxford and earned his Masters of Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley.

Sponsored by the SMoCA Salon. 

 
^{Atherton | Keener, 90 Days Over 100° installation shot
© Atherton | Keener, photo Bill Timmerman}

May 22, 2010-
September 19, 2010

Gallery 4, SMoCA