PUBLIC RECEPTORS: BENEATH THE SKIN A TEXTILE INSTALLATION BY NEW YORK PRIZE FELLOW GABI SCHILLIG APRIL 2 – 17, 2009

PUBLIC RECEPTORS: BENEATH THE SKIN
A TEXTILE INSTALLATION BY NEW YORK PRIZE FELLOW GABI SCHILLIG
APRIL 2 – 17, 2009

OPENING RECEPTION: THURSDAY, APRIL 2, 6:30 P.M.
VAN ALEN INSTITUTE, 30 WEST 22ND STREET, NEW YORK, NY 10010
RSVP@VANALEN.ORG | WWW.VANALEN.ORG


Van Alen Institute is pleased to announce Public Receptors: Beneath the Skin, a textile installation by New York Prize Fellow Gabi Schillig, a conceptual artist and architect based in Berlin. Schillig’s wearable spatial structures mediate between private users and public spaces, provoking new relationships between bodies, clothing, and the built environment Redefining the garment as tactile architecture, Schillig explores the potential for soft geometries and surfaces of textiles, conventionally associated with individual bodies and human scale, to generate alternative arrangements of social space and modes of interaction in the urban fabric. For Schillig, multiple users, desires, and urban contexts are necessary to materialize her work. Designed to be interconnected and shared, her second skins evolve an architecture built upon the creativity of its participants.

Over the course of her fellowship residency, Schillig has developed a new set of textile structures she calls public receptors, and she has conducted a series of site-specific experiments for their implementation in New York City. Made from felt, latex, and a variety of fastening devices, the structures are designed for attachment to specific building surfaces and street conditions, to be improvised and appropriated for clothing, furniture, habitat, or other uses. Upon contact, they transform in geometry, texture, and color from two-dimensional and often camouflaged elements in the city to three-dimensional interfaces that sensitize and reassociate urban bodies to environments at multiple scales. Public Receptors: Beneath the Skin assembles Schillig’s textile structures in Van Alen Institute’s gallery for staged and spontaneous performance, interaction, and play. They are presented alongside footage of Schillig’s experiments in the city, with documentation of her research processes and material investigations.

The Van Alen Institute New York Prize Fellowship is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York State Council on the Arts, a state agency. Public Receptors: Beneath the Skin was made possible with the additional support of Johanna Daimer e.K., Filze aller Art – Deeply Felt, Munich. Special thanks to Barbara Barone, Parsons The New School for Design, for her assistance with the production of the textile structures, and to performers Lydia Bell, Khalia Frazier, and Stephanie Fungsang.