Dissimulating and Disheveling Matter Downtown Exhibition

Please join the Syracuse Architecture students of the Dissimulating and Disheveling Matter advisory group for a thesis exhibition opening on Friday, May 14 at 11am in downtown Syracuse.

The exhibition is the culmination of architectural student work produced over the course of the past year.

Advisors: Jean-François Bédard, Britt Eversole, Roger Hubeli, Julie Larsen

Projects by: Vasundhra Aggarwal & Jaclyn Doyle, Cynthia George & Cathy Wu, Maria Gutierrez Ramirez & Elise Zilius, Fei Hu, Tota Hunter, Jack Hymowitz, Rui Li, Bennett Powers, Alec Rovensky

A focus on matter swerves around the comforting disingenuity of good practice and pretty aesthetics. It insists on an approach that looks not at the quantitative “performance” of materials but the behavior and misbehavior of assemblages, practices, and machines. Matter eschews nature/ culture oppositions, insofar as matter (both material and immaterial) can be simulated, projected, and invented to create new feedback loops with environmental systems and networks. Animal, vegetable, mineral-you can design them all. Tectonics reaffirm, but matter satisfies desires, weaponizes fears, plays with memory, and upsets our aesthetic proclivities and our penchant for perfection. Matter absorbs pain and pleasure. Matter releases placebos, toxins, pestilences, hallucinogens, and curatives. Matter is already encoded with politics, economy, geology, geography, genetics, and (deep) history. Matter is always already befouled, stained, sullied, and covered in blood. We aspire to disheveled tectonics, alt-materiality, corrupted aesthetics, fuzzy connections, and unethical assemblages. We look for flaccid strength, weak structures, dirty ecologies, and low-brow logics. We delineate forces, image substances, project failures, and design for cyborgs (you’re already a cyborg, btw). We aim for unprofessional practice, to engineer the organic, and to faithfully falsify. Reject the binary opposition, stop trying to cleanse yourself of your imperfections, stop trying to fix everything, get over your fake honesty, and get with a real that’s better than reality. Matter is what you make of it.

The exhibition is open to walk-ins through Friday, May 21 during the following hours:

• Friday 5/14: 11am – 6pm
• Saturday 5/15: 11am – 7pm
• Sunday 5/16: 11am – 7pm
• Monday 5/17: 11am – 3pm
• Tuesday 5/18: 11am – 3pm
• Wednesday 5/19: 11am – 3pm
• Thursday 5/20: 11am – 3pm
• Friday 5/21: 11am – 7pm

Due to COVID safety regulations, the space will be limited to an occupancy of 20 people at one time. Please wear a face covering at all times when visiting the exhibition.

This exhibition was made possible by Acropolis Realty Group, the Renée Crown University Honors Program and The SOURCE from the Syracuse University Office of Research.