Dan Cameron
Lucia Koch is a sculptor first and foremost, so the works she creates require a degree of physical materiality to even exist. But she demonstrates far less evident interest in the literal aspects of physical space than most other sculptors, even those who focus their attention on the visual properties of architecture, as she also does. In her series Fundos, Koch chose photography as a starting point, using the interiors of cardboard boxes and paper bags as a stand-in for actual buildings, and photographing them in a way that captured the intricacies of filtered light as if they were the interiors of chapels or modernist homes. Playing with our expectations of scale, Koch also tended to print these photographs at their maximum size, so that the discovery of their actual subject would be as jarring as possible. These works, which also introduced Koch’s work to an international audience, were themselves the indirect fruits of years of collaborative works undertaken in the early 1990s as part of the project Arte Construtora, which carried out artistic interventions in domestic, urban, and public spaces in different Brazilian cities.
Having encountered Koch’s photographed work in Brazil in the early 2000s and been impressed by her ability to transform something so commonplace into an image that radiated a powerful ambiguity about its sources, I invited the artist to be one of the participating artists in the 8th Istanbul Biennial. While aware of her interest in architecture and the social contexts in which art is experienced, I had not anticipated that she would propose a work that extended so perceptively into the everyday culture of cosmopolitan Istanbul. Attracted by the dome-like ceilings of most traditional buildings, and intrigued by gender-based divisions of many aspects of social life in Islamic cultures, Koch developed a site-specific proposal for the oldest commercially accessible hamam in Istanbul, in which color was the medium for a subtle investigation of how that which can be seen is invariably played off against that which cannot.
Although her stated interest was in harnessing the natural light that poured in through the ceiling small holes, and introducing a startling transformation in the coloring of this light by attaching colored gels to the individual glass panes, Koch was also interested in considering social concerns as well. Traditionally, Turkish baths are segregated by gender, so that male and female clientele never get a glimpse of the space that the other gender uses. While this meant that even the most enthusiastic viewer could only experience one-half of her intervention, Koch was intrigued by the possibility of creating an imaginary reflection of the space one could see, simply by making it clear that the side one couldn’t visit was also transformed, and in a way that was distinct from what one could see. Since to traverse these internal boundaries was not just a violation of social principles, but a literal transgression of gender identities, one was left with the knowledge that what one saw was one-half of the artist’s project, and that one could only experience the other half through second-hand reports from sympathetic members of the other sex. In other words, the separation of genders became a platform for interactive gender relationships, even if these were only in the form of reportage and visual imagination.
While over the past two decades Koch has occasionally worked in more conventional sculptural formats, her interest in exploring the ways in which light can be a defining characteristic of social space has led her to a number of experiments that deploy conventional materials towards highly unexpected ends. Koch’s first solo exhibition in the US, at Christopher Grimes Gallery in Santa Monica in 2013, suggested a series of allusions to the durable properties of space, while veering sharply away from any sense of actual permanence. For instance, the largest photograph on view, the ten-by-twenty-foot Riso Arborio (2006), was positioned in a way that it seemed to mirror the surrounding gallery space—even the image of the cellophane window in the infinitely smaller box that provided the photograph’s subject takes on near-monumental importance. The Wrong Wall (2013), created for the exhibition, recalled Koch’s constructed projects for the 2006 Bienal de São Paulo, among others, in that it fully undermines the functions of a wall while studiously adhering to its material conditions. Using pegboard to introduce the hypothetical possibility of seeing through the curvilinear walls, the wall in fact meandered through the gallery space in a strikingly nonassertive way, creating oddly demarcated smaller rooms that were visually cut off from one another. Another of Koch’s key structures was the centerpiece of her 2015 exhibition at Grimes, in the form of a floor-to-ceiling curtain, let there be a set x (2015), whose color dissolves from a desert sand to an ocean-blue sky in gradations too fine for the eye to detect.
For her participation in Prospect.3 New Orleans (2014), Koch chose for her site- specific project one of the most challenging spaces in the city’s Contemporary Art Center (CAC): an L-shaped gallery slightly above street level, which is encased by window walls that look either out onto the street or across the CAC’s reception area. Using dozens of tinted glass panes of varying size and hues, Koch created a single continuous environment, titled Mood Disorder, in which the sheets of glass simply leaned against the walls, stairwell, window sills, and each other, but at precise angles that enabled them to catch the sunlight as it streamed through the architecture, and send the tinted reflections around the walls, ceiling, and floors. Because the piece functioned without any separate framing or armature, it had the unexpected quality of appearing somewhat nonexistent, as if the components of the work just happened to land where they were, and what was occurring was merely an extension of what was already part of the environment before the artist arrived on the scene.
A similar dynamic infuses Koch’s proposal for the XIII Bienal de Cuenca, which, while still a work in progress as of this writing, was initiated through her proposed collaboration with Al Borde, an Ecuadoran architectural collective whose work focus- es on using locally sourced materials and non-specialized labor to introduce design initiatives into communities where contemporary architecture rarely plays a role— for example, in oceanfront communities devastated by the April 2016 earthquake. Koch’s initial project consisted in an intervention at a public marketplace in the Plaza San Francisco, which itself functions as a kind of informal economy relative to the municipally sanctioned indoor markets (including one two blocks away). The hastily built and somewhat shoddy shelters used in Plaza San Francisco, which are considered eyesores by many neighbors and inspired local authorities to attempt to shut the market down, happen to possess ceiling apertures in which a project using colored gels was in the process of gaining traction when it was denied permission. In Cuenca, the search continues for a public space of everyday commerce, in which the subtle grace note of colored rays of light could have a rejuvenating effect on the merchants and their clientele, but Koch is still pursuing one of her most consistent goals: employing the minimum materials and infrastructure to harness the power of light and color, in order to transform our spatial experiences, often without our even being aware that the artist has been present.
2016
Text published in the book Lucia Koch.