In the Project Space
For Anna Semenoff, sculpture offers an arena to consider the reciprocal relationship between the built environment and our perception and experience thereof; or, how the world we make, makes us in turn. She is interested in the psychosocial impacts of technological structures, and how our built environment creates possible futures of which we are not yet aware.
First Things First, Semenoff’s new sculptural installation, is a spatial, material, and conceptual study of the arch; an architectural form that connects or delineates space, and whose geometry allows it to bear excessive weight and span large distances. The arch’s necessity and ubiquity were diminished somewhat with the widespread usage of reinforced concrete, a material that has become an omnipresent feature of our world, forming the basis of homes, skyscrapers, bridges, highways, and dams alike.
Semenoff’s series of three self-supporting arches unfold in sequence, creating a succession of portals or thresholds in space. Each arch consists of a series of transparent resin blocks, which have been cast into interlocking forms. Hollow beeswax pyramids form the keystone and base of each arch. In keeping with Semenoff’s architectural reference point, the structural integrity of the arches is entirely self-evident. Gravity, geometry, and compression hold the form together; nothing is hidden.
We encounter First Things First within the architecture of the Project Space, within the built environment of Inglewood, itself dominated by concrete and glass. The raking prairie light that refracts through the glassy resin and is absorbed by the flesh-like beeswax is not direct sunlight, but is rather a reflection of the glass façade across 9th Avenue. Cumulatively, with First Things First, Semenoff meditates on the relationship between structures, reality, and meaning, and searches for wonder and enchantment within the material and formal possibilities of sculpture.