The ambient character of installation art results from the use of architectural strategies and techniques that effectively structure and organize perception. These include the territorialization of an entire site that the viewer can enter, the use of real materials rather than representations, and an emphasis on the literal interaction of the viewer with the work. Indeed, both the viewer and the space of the gallery, or site, play a constitutive role. In contrast to historiographies that trace its antecedents to land art, conceptual art, and minimalist sculpture, this article traces installation art to radical attempts by painters to spatialize the picture plane,
Skins & Screens, the graduate‐level elective studio offered at the University of Pennsylvania, posits the building surface as a dynamic condition, simultaneously real and illusory, opaque and evanescent. Termed sheer opacity, this quality of enclosure provides an investigative focus for the consideration of surface as a dynamic perceptual field, a site for the mediation of physical and perceptual phenomena. Close analysis of selected work of the West Coast art movement Light and Space and that of contemporary installation artists inspired projects that used sheer opacity to examine the possibility of transforming space through the design of the building surface. Projects were developed through a series of “layers” in which students made installations, material constructs, digital simulations, and large‐scale detail studies of their proposals.
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