ARCHIVE
ALLAN WEXLER
Final presentations consisted of choreographies that transformed an element or space in the building. An ordinary light switch becomes electricity explained. A lonely brick is brought into awareness by using it for every action around a breakfast table. The space under the stairs becomes a theater. And a piece of plumbing that penetrates a glass pane becomes a continuous line through multiple shiny glass rooms.
Allan Wexler has worked in the fields of architecture, design and fine art for forty five years. He is represented by the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York City and teaches in the School of Constructed Environments at Parsons the New School for Design in New York City. Allan’s works explore human activity and the built environment. He works as an investigator using series, permutations and chance rather than searching for definitive solutions. He makes buildings, furniture, vessels and utensils as backdrops and props for everyday, ordinary human activity. The works isolate, elevate, and monumentalize our daily rituals: dining, sleeping, and bathing. And they, in turn, become mechanisms that activate ritual, ceremony and movement, turning these ordinary activities into theater.
It is by dissolving the boundaries between the fine arts and the applied arts, between furniture design, architecture and theatrical performance, between sculpture and interactive exhibition design and between the practice and the research of architecture, that new ideas and innovation flourishes.