Making Space / Space Making with Edie Fake

2-day workshop:

Saturday, May 15
and Sunday, May 16, 2021
10am-2pm PDT

How do we envision the future we want? Do we change existing structures or build from the ground up?

In Making Space / Space Making we'll look at techniques for visionary placemaking, using drawing as a core tool. This workshop will include three approaches to transforming one's social values into blueprints for a future we want to work towards, as well as a short lecture on Edie's practice with the architectural imagination and the importance of bringing abstract concepts into spatial visualization.

The workshop is built around 3 design exercises:

Site Adjusted
What do we build if we could change what exists now?
Participants begin by choosing a photo or blueprint of a building/structure they want to question, remake, interrogate or abandon (prisons, banks, police stations, schools, etc). After a period of reflecting and notetaking on how they would like the existing structure to transform its purpose, a period of intuitive drawing follows where they will draw or collage directly on top of the existing image.

Site Reenvisioned
How do we rebuild when structures have failed us?
Using the drawings from exercise 1, we'll now look at designing this social space from the ground up. Participants will reflect on what the space could be if it wasn't merely re-vamped, but entirely redesigned, visually and functionally. Starting with the same initial photo or blueprint, this time drawing on tracing paper or vellum, participants will envision a structure that fills the footprint of the old institution, but is not limited by the existing structure.

Site Envisioned
What do we have yet to build?
Utilizing the thought processes from the first two exercises, the third and final exercise of the workshop asks participants to dream of an alternate reality where the original site and the problems it posed never existed. With this blank slate, participants work on a fresh sheet of paper to draw a space for the people who used the original to occupy. This new structure doesn't have to have a defined function, and it doesn't need to reflect the functionality of the original structure (although it can have both or either).

 

Edie Fake is an artist working in Twentynine Palms, California. His work deals with trans and nonbinary histories, bodies and identities through pattern, color and architectural metaphor. Fake's work plays with unearthing trans histories and rendering architectural "impossibilities" as a way to visualize elusive concepts around making space for queer perspectives.

Fake's drawings, paintings, comics, books and publications have been written about it in artforum, ArtNews, The Comics Journal, Art 21, The Guardian, Hyperallergic, The Los Angeles Review of Books and were recently featured in the Paris Review. He was one of the first recipients of Printed Matter's Awards for Artists and his collection of comics, Gaylord Phoenix, won the 2011 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Graphic Novel. Fake is represented by Western Exhibitions in Chicago and Broadway Gallery in New York. Fake's recent projects include designing a national voter registration billboard campaign for Facebook and a quarantine drawing exercise for the New York Times. He currently has murals on view at The Drawing Center in New York and the Berkeley Art Museum and Film Archive in California.