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Cheryl Goldsleger
utopia
November 21, 2005 – February 1, 2006
2100 C St NW, Upstairs Gallery
February 16 – April 28, 2006
500 Fifth St NW, First Floor Gallery
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The mixed-media paintings in this exhibition are based on blueprints and renderings of female architects of varying degrees of renown, beginning with the first published drawing (1878) by a female architect, Margaret Hicks, and concluding with the late 20th-century designs of Gae Aulenti and Margreet Duinker.
Working with architectural imagery throughout her career, Cheryl Goldsleger has been compared to M.C. Escher and Giovanni Battista Piranesi for her depictions of seemingly realistic spaces that are physically impossible. In this body of work from 2002-2003, Goldsleger shifts from imagined to specific subject matter. Her three-dimensional encaustic and resin works represent plans and diagrams of realizable structures, some of which were actually built in Amsterdam, Chandigarh, India, Dover, Massachusetts, San Francisco and elsewhere.
This exhibition grew out of Goldsleger’s interest in the history of women in architecture. Until the late nineteenth century, women were discouraged and often barred from entering the profession. In the 1890s, the first women graduated with degrees in architecture from MIT. Today, more than twenty percent of all registered architects are women.
Derived from the Greek word for “no place,” the exhibition’s title refers to architectural proposals that have developed out of the desire to create ideal spaces for people to inhabit. Included here are plans for private dwellings with a shared kitchen and laundry building, a solar home, a worker’s housing development and communal housing that is spacious and flexible.
Goldsleger began the architectural drawings for this series in a computer program call 3D-SX. Goldsleger drew an image of the form into the program and it, in turn, transposed her sketch into additional views which collectively described the form in three-dimensions. She then used a three-dimensional printer known as a Rapid Prototype Machine (RPM), which sprayed wax from nozzles or catalyzed layers of resin into a platen, slowly building up the form.
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