Steven Matijcio, Director and Chief Curator
Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston

All process images by Lauren Henkin. All still in situ images by Jeremy Kramer. All in situ videos by Asa Featherstone and Alyssa Maurer.

When I first saw this space, I was struck by the rigid geometries of the surrounding urban environment. By siting the piece immediately as you walk into the building, there is an instant engagement with art that is unexpected.

My initial response was to break that formal language using an elemental and residential building material, cedar shingles. I experimented in the studio, creating models at varying scales to test the idea, and begin formalizing the shape.  

Prop 2 is located on the ground floor facing Walnut Street. The space is occupied by a lone concrete stool, which looks to be there only to complement three more that are on on the outside of the building (likely to prevent skateboarders from enjoying the “Urban Carpet” wall. I wanted to complete this thought on the interior, creating other concrete forms that look as if they’re twisting or morphing into the shape of the existing stool.

I began sketching in watercolor, loosely developing the idea.

Prop 3 is located in between Zaha Hadid’s “Urban Carpet” wall and the ground floor steel stairwell, a space that exists to emphasize the forms that create it. The space feels weighty with the tall, curved concrete wall to the left and the black steel stairwell to the right. The ground plane feels as if its shifting, with the edge of the wall bleeding into the floor and flattening in a diagonal through the space.

In a 2001 interview with Mohsen Mostafavi titled “Landscape as Plan,” Zaha Hadid refers to two principles (for other projects, not CAC) which guided my process for Prop 3. First she talks about an exterior landscape being sucked into the interior of the building, which is how I interpreted her meaning in the placement and design of the “Urban Carpet.” Second, she refers to a “multiplicity of grounds” and “the ground as a layered topography, peeling and warping and multiplying the ground surface.”

I wanted to extend her thoughts, while interjecting my own interpretation of how that space might be subdivided to create several smaller spaces which can be experienced from various perspectives (including as one descends from the stairwell).

This was an immersive exploration, shifting back and forth between model-making, drawing and photography; each medium allowing a deeper understanding of the space and its potential.

I wanted to use materials that were present in the space, but expose some of what was embedded in them. While normally steel mesh plays a supporting role in a concrete structure, I did the reverse, making the steel the structural element, supporting broken pieces (or planes) of concrete, which, when formed, create multiple spaces to be explored while breaking the existing space between the “Urban Carpet” and stairwell into multiple smaller ones.

I created a 1”:1’ model of the space and photographed each creation from various angles, trying to get a sense of how the scale of the piece would feel and how the piece would change from various perspectives.

One of the goals of this exhibition was to present art in unexpected places throughout the building. Many of the areas that seemed underutilized were ones meant for circulation. One such area was a hallway leading to the women’s restrooms on the second floor. The hallway has a nice stream of light coming down the left wall and it’s a space that would offer an opportunity for a surprising engagement with art.

I wanted to use a material that would be expected in a restroom, but formed to make one wonder whether what they were looking at is art, or a remnant from construction. I created a model of the space and worked with pieces of wood to begin engaging the meeting of the two walls and the well of light coming from the ceiling.

The environment for Prop 5 is the third floor stairwell landing. It’s a dynamic space with engagement around the landing as well as looking down (onto the floating glass plane skylight—see Prop 6) and above to higher floors.

This is a space I was immediately drawn to because it offered the opportunity to create a sculpture that’s boundaries were hard to define and that could expand the ways in which we’re used to experiencing sculpture—instead of moving around it or having a purely frontal perspective, one would be able have completely different engagements with it as the space is traversed from above or below.

My first response was to create a form that looked suspended between these two planes while also fractilizing the space. I began with some initial sketches and quickly moved to larger scale models where I was better able to test ideas about scale, light and form.

As the idea became more fully formed, I felt that compressed plywood and unfinished lumber would be the best materials to use. It would bring a rough, unfinished quality to the space that would hold its own in terms of visually weight when perceived with the steel stairwells.

Zaha Hadid designed an incredible plane of glass in between the second and third floors to help filter light down to the ground level. The plane is not accessible, but can be viewed from above and below. One end of the plane intersects the large glass exterior wall at one end of the building which I felt would be a very interesting space to work with—particularly because it could not be experienced on foot.

There were a few considerations for this space that were unique in the exhibition—the materials would have to be lightweight enough to be supported by the glass; it would need to be installed in pieces; while the piece would only be able to be viewed from above (over one balcony), I wanted the viewer to be able to experience the entire area, as if they were standing there; and despite the perspectival limitations, I wanted the piece to still retain a formal sculptural quality.

I began sketching and then moved to larger models, creating pieces that referenced tripods or light boxes; objects that would stand upright and face the viewer looking down from the stairway landing above.

The drawings evolved as I explored material options, becoming specific after discovering mirrored acrylic, which would be a lightweight material that would reflect what was happening in the space upward.

The Prop 7 location is on the fourth floor in the hallway that leads to staff office space and restrooms. I wanted one of the interventions in the exhibition to be located in a space that serves primarily as a functional space. These are areas in any building which aren’t the “wow” spaces, but ones that serve some fundamental purpose for circulation or storage or “back-end” activities. It isn’t likely that a visitor would find this space, making the ones that do participants in a more intimate act of discovery and open to the idea that art can be found anywhere.

My first response to this space was that it’s very sterile and clearly not meant for engagement (despite the bench). I took notice of the two electrical panels in the middle of the space and started playing with materials that I imagined were behind the walls.

Working with the materials led me to the idea of creating bulbous forms scattered throughout the space that would weave in and out of the walls and engage the bench, creating patterns of shadows and breaking the flat, stoic nature of the space.

The men’s restroom in the lower level of the Museum offered an opportunity to, like the women’s restroom intervention, create an experience with art that is unexpected. I wanted to create a piece that would occupy the far corner of a nook where the sinks are that would project outward into the space, interrupting the small space in a way so that it would be hard to ignore this piece near the ceiling.

I began working with models to better understand the scale of the space and how the form should work within it.

^ click to enlarge

About CAC
Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, is a non-collecting museum that spent its first years in the basement of the Cincinnati Art Museum, followed by a move in 1964 to the downtown Women’s Exchange Building and in 1970 to the Mercantile Center on Fifth Street where it occupied 10,000 square feet of exhibition space. At the time, it was was one of the largest exhibition venues in the U.S. dedicated to contemporary art. 

In 2003, CAC moved into the Lois & Richard Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art, designed by Zaha Hadid, an Iraqi-British architect who was the first woman to receive the Pritzker Architecture Prize (in 2004). The Rosenthal Center was the first U.S. museum designed by a woman.

The Rosenthal Center has more than 16,000 square feet of exhibition space, a dedicated black box performance space and the Sara M. and Patrica A. Vance UnMuseum, and 6,600 square foot multi-generational exhibition and education space. 

About Zaha Hadid
Zaha Hadid was an Iraqi-British architect (b. 1950, d. 2016). She won multiple awards including the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2004 (she was the first woman to do so), the Stirling Prize in 2010 and 2011, and in 2015 she became the first and only woman to be awarded the Royal Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects.

Major works include the aquatic centre for the London 2012 Olympics, Michigan State University’s Broad Art Museum, the MAXXI Museum in Rome, the Guangzhou Opera House in China, and the Beijing Daxing International Airport. 

Zaha Hadid is widely considered one of the most inventive and daring architects of a generation. Her work is so distinctive it’s hard not to know that you’re looking at a Zaha building. 

Following her death in March 2016, Michael Kimmelman of The New York Times wrote, her “soaring structures left a mark on skylines and imaginations and in the process re-shaped architecture for the modern age ... Her buildings elevated uncertainty to an art, conveyed in the odd way of one entered and moved through these buildings and in the questions that her structures raised about how they were supported ... Hadid embodied, in its profligacy and promise, the era of so-called starchitects who roamed the planet in pursuit of their own creative genius, offering miracles, occasionally delivering."

Her work continues through the firm she started, Zaha Hadid Architects. 

Exhibition Dates
The Props exhibition, in full, was on view from November 22, 2019 - March 1, 2020. Three pieces will continue to be shown through 2021.

Museum Hours
Saturday–Monday: 10am–4pm 
Tuesday: Closed 
Wednesday–Friday: 10am–9pm

Please check with the Museum regarding COVID-19 closures and policies.

Location
CAC is located at 44 E. 6th Street (the corner of 6th and Walnut Streets) in downtown Cincinnati. Street and lot parking are available. See here for more information on directions and parking.

An exhibition catalog was published by Vela Noche Press in 2021. Steven Matijcio wrote an original essay, Parasites & Prop[osal]s for the 68-page book which acts as documentation for both process and actualization.

The book was funded in part by a grant from the Maine Arts Commission, an independent state agency supported by the National Endowment for the Arts.