Research

  • Siting Expositions: The Shaped Spaces of World's Fairs and the Olympic Games
  • GRANTEE
    Ryan Griffis, Lize Mogel & Sarah Ross
    GRANT YEAR
    2009

Siting Expositions connects and contrasts former and future sites of mega-events such as World's Fairs and the Olympics. The project critically examines how these international spectacles transform global cities through planning, architecture, and ideology. It explores shared characteristics between the Olympics and World's Fairs, and their spatial and social effects on cities. Research includes site visits to selected World's Fair and Olympic host cities around the world; archival research; interviews with World's Fair and Olympic officials, city planners, site historians, event participants, and others; documentation of sites through photography and mapping; and speculative imagemaking. One focus was on Vancouver’s False Creek, transformed by Expo86 and the 2010 Olympic Games, as a case study for how mega-events impact cities.

Ryan Griffis is an artist currently teaching new media art at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.  His writing has appeared in publications such as the New Art Examiner, RePublic, ArtUS, Artlink, Rhizome, and Furtherfield. He has curated exhibitions for the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Turbulence.org, Greenmuseum.org, and George Mason University on themes that include the politics of genetic technologies, energy consumption, and artistic forays into agriculture. Under the name Temporary Travel Office, Ryan creates work and publications that attempt to use tourism as an opportunity for critical public encounters. These encounters include public tours of urban parking lots, speculative proposals for parks and hotels and, most recently, a series of experimental guidebooks. These works have been presented in various institutional forums, including the Bureau for Open Culture (Columbus College of Art & Design), AREA Chicago, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, and Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions.

Lize Mogel is an interdisciplinary artist who works at the interstices between art and cultural geography. She creates and disseminates counter-cartography, including maps and mappings that produce new understandings of social and political issues. Her work connects the real history and collective imaginary about specific places to larger narratives of global economies. She has mapped public parks in Los Angeles; future territorial disputes in the Arctic; and wastewater economies in New York. Lize is co-editor of the book/map collection An Atlas of Radical Cartography and cocurator of the traveling exhibition An Atlas. Exhibitions include the Gwangju (South Korea) and Sharjah (U.A.E.) Biennials, PS1 (NYC), Casco (Utrecht), and Experimental Geography (touring). She has lectured about her work at numerous venues internationally and has received grants from the Jerome Foundation, the Graham Foundation, the LEF Foundation, and the Danish Arts Council.

Sarah Ross is an artist who works in video, sculpture, and photo. Her projects use narrative and the body to address spatial concerns as they relate to access, class, anxiety, and activism. Ross has cocurated exhibitions at SPACES Gallery, Cleveland; Sea and Space Explorations, Los Angeles; and PS122, New York. She works collaboratively with artists and neighborhood groups to produce public projects. She teaches at the School of the Art Institute Chicago and at an Illinois state prison. She is the recipient of grants from the Graham Foundation, the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts, and the Illinois Art Council. She has exhibited work at the Armory, Pasadena, CA; Gallery 727, Los Angeles; PS122, New York; Columbia College, Chicago; Pinkard Gallery, Baltimore; META Cultural Foundation, Romania; and the Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal.