Research

  • Carpet Space
  • GRANTEE
    Assaf Evron & Dan Handel
    GRANT YEAR
    2019

Assaf Evron, Hyatt O'Hare (VI), 2018. Courtesy of the artist.

Carpet Space is a project that explores the relationship between carpet and architecture. Like buildings, carpets come in various sizes and typologies that reflect and adapt to their host architecture: free standing monolithic pieces in free-plan structures; wall-to-wall carpets that follow the outline of plans; or tile-carpets that adopt the flexibility of modular spaces. The project focuses on the deep spaces of hospitality—architectural types such as hotels, convention centers, and casinos that emerged with the advent of artificial lighting and air conditioning and bloated to mammoth scales on the wings of advanced capitalism. Carpet Space proposes a critical inquiry of these interiors, meant to explore their extreme articulations from perspectives of both architectural history and contemporary art. In the former, the project exposes the links between optics, technology, body politics, and space. In the latter, we experiment with how to convey the rationale, patterns, and effects of carpet landscapes.

Assaf Evron’s work investigates the nature of vision and the ways in which it reflects in socially constructed structures, where he applies photographic thinking in various two and three-dimensional media. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums internationally. Evron holds an MA from The Cohn Institute as well as an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), where he currently teaches. He has received numerous awards including the Graham Foundation (2017), Israel Lottery (2017), Artis (2016), the Gerard Levy Prize (2012), and the James Weinstein Fellowship from SAIC (2013). In 2019 he exhibited a special project at the Mies van der Rohe-designed McCormick House at Elmhurst Art Museum in Illinois, as a debut for a series of photographic interventions in Mies van der Rohe’s architecture. In Fall 2019 he will have his first US museum solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago.

Dan Handel is an architect and curator whose work focuses on research-based exhibitions with special attention to underexplored ideas, figures, and practices that shape contemporary built environments. He was the inaugural Young Curator at the at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, has developed exhibitions for the Venice Biennale and the New Institute in Rotterdam, and was curator of architecture and design at the Israel Museum. Handel holds an MArch from the Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, and a PhD from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology. His writing has appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, e-flux Architecture, Thresholds, Frame, San Rocco, Pin-Up, Bracket, and the Journal of Landscape Architecture, among others. He is the editor of the publications Aircraft Carrier (Hajte Cantz, 2012), Yasky and Co. (Tel Aviv Museum, 2016), and Manifest: A Journal of American Architecture and Urbanism.