CAC.C Studio V

Welcome to the CAC.C Studio V blog.  This blog will be updated daily by the students and professor of Studio V as a way to document our design/build process, and keep all those who may be interested in our progress of the semester’s project informed.

STUDIO V focuses on architecture and tectonics, particularly the relationship between design and building. STUDIO V will emulate practice in that, unlike standard academic exercises, students will not always work in isolation on hypothetical situations. We will work often in collaboration. The studio will offer an approach to design informed by how something is assembled and the materials from which it is made. The studio will employ craft in the execution of the work, which will require patience, planning, understanding tolerance in materials and tools, testing and mock-ups, and the working with the limits and capabilities of tools and materials.

This spring the studio is devoted to the execution of one project, designing, fabricating, and installing a viewing platform to better appreciate the artwork of artist Motoi Yamamoto in the Halsey Gallery at the College of Charleston. Entitled Return to the Sea: Saltworks, the centerpiece of the exhibition will be a site-specific installation created entirely out of salt by the artist during his three-week residency at the Halsey Institute. Our clients for this project are Motoi Yamamoto, the artist; and Mark Sloan, the director and senior curator of HICA.  The exhibition will also feature a series of recent drawings, paintings, sketchbooks, a video about the artist’s process and the importance of salt in Japanese culture to be produced by the Halsey Institute, and a 116-page color catalogue documenting fourteen years of the artist’s saltworks around the world.

Motoi Yamamoto is an internationally renowned artist who calls his native Japan home. He was born in Onomichi, Hiroshima, in 1966, and received his BA from Kanazawa College of Art in 1995. He has exhibited his award-winning creations around the globe, in such cities as Athens, Cologne, Jerusalem, Mexico City, Seoul, Tokyo, and Toulouse. He was awarded the Philip Morris Art Award in 2002 as well as the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2003. Although he participated in a group exhibition that same year at New York’s P.S. 1, his work has yet to be widely seen in the United States.

The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art has organized this show as a major traveling exhibition premiering in Charleston May 24-July 7, 2012, as a featured presentation of the Spoleto Festival USA.  It is scheduled to travel to multiple cities throughout the US and it is to be assumed that the structure created for the Halsey Gallery will travel as well.