Ishmael Randall-Weeks’ work revolves around reflections on the relationship between architecture and its social context. He creates site-specific installations, sculptures, and works on paper ranging from complex large-scale installations to more intimately sized objects. These spaces introduce the formal and material bases of everyday elements to address a discourse around urbanism, education, and time. The use of construction materials that have sustained their use—from pre-Columbian cultures to the legacies of Modernism— is part of his interest in engaging in a dialogue about the collective through form and materiality. 

In ANGLES OF ROTATION the transformative physical movements such as straining, extending, folding, that are formally captured in the objects Randall-Weeks creates seem to mirror the tendencies in the mechanisms of human thinking. These mediating spaces, translucent barriers, and permeable divisions project an imaginary window where temporal and geographical distances collapse, enabling us to rethink the relationship between past and present.  This relationship to time and its elusive nature is layered in the exploration of various temporalities, -or address timelessness itself, as seen in his choice of artwork titles-but in essence are used as a call to trace a different-i.e.-fairer-political, cultural, and social horizon for the future.   

On view in this exhibition, works like, CODIGO ATEMPORAL, UNITS OF MEASURMENT and CARPETA contain notebooks, rulers, fictitious chalk and chalkboards - tools turned symbols of acquiring and dictating knowledge. The books and artifacts embedded into the layered materials, however, obstruct or contain access to any knowledge hinting at the complexities and power dynamics inherent in it. Meanwhile, in some they are attached and arranged as if to suggest educational prosthetics in the form of toolboxes and display cases.  The Tizas (chalks), for their part, present a visual analysis of colors, textures, and materials derived from the search for and categorization of our urban presence—both sensory and material: the ground we walk on, the walls that rise around us, the minerals that surround us, and the material goods of our daily lives.   

In BIOMBO (CARICA PERSPECTIVE) a hinged transformable sculpture, made from sheets of ground raw copper from Peru’s mines, is inlayed with two intersecting brass elements that form two polygonal line drawings. The brass and concrete grids engage with hierarchical aspects of design, from both a contemporary and historical perspective. The word biombo is a Hispanization of the Japanese byobu, which means “protection from wind.” This screen, much like another work in the show, SURFACE PERSPECTIVE (ALBERTI’S VEIL) is still movable but are deprived of any function, hang on the wall, covered by a veil of precious mineral or rattan, are essentially enigmatic tableaus of personal protection and energy, privacy, intimacy, seclusion, and revelation.

The works MEASUREMENT/MEDITATIONS FOR SCARPA weave together the carefully crafted joint and details of pre-Colombian motifs with some of the poetic details in Carlo Scarpa’s architecture where the inlayed objects join with the layering of organic material. The relationship of the healing and energetic minerals (Amazonite, Pyrite, Ruby Zoisite and Bianco Perlino) elements charges a dialogue imbued with perspectives on the detail, the nuanced intricacies in our daily lives and a search for elements that signify a certain care.

Through the juxtaposition of elements, a concrete and sculptural record of the everyday is created, orchestrated by modernist nods as well as references rooted in the Latin American Andean worldview. The work thus becomes a continuous abstract exploration and a delicate process of geometric discovery, revealing both a material diary of our everyday existence and a series of forms that range from the architectural to the abstract languages of weaving.

In essence, and true to his overarching artistic inquiry, many works in the exhibition revolve around the explorations of the characteristics and the notion of space. Whether be the psychology of a space or the limitations and potential expandability of space.