Nick Axel (class 2010) at Storefront for Art & Architecture, NYC.
Alumnae News:
MAKING BEING DOING.
December 17 to 21, Nick Axel (SoA-RPI’ 2010) will be in residency at Storefront for Art and Architecture as a part of their Younger than Storefront: Five-Day Artist Residencies program and BEING exhibition.
About the project
What is a residency for? What does one do during a residency? One works. But what is work? In this particular sense work is a verb, but an empty verb at that. Apparently ambivalent, an economic form of the market teaches us that work is anything but neutral. Instead, work is highly prejudicial not only towards what fills its emptiness, but how it digests and what it excretes.
Work is also a noun, and a proper noun if you will. We are used to having various metrics such as efficiency, operativity, or the somewhat-mystical affinity, being used to judge whether something is Work, or if it’s just something that was done. Be it economic or otherwise, we could therefore deduce that the basic condition for work is its potential for being judged as such.
This residency seeks to reveal the limits of work by performatively radicalizing a Duchampesque critique of the cultural institution and its centralization of discursive power. Within the milieu of Storefront, technically speaking, everything regarding my spatiotemporal presence, from the food I eat to the movements I make to the thoughts I think, can become work. The task at hand is therefore to exhaust my presence to its utmost capacities. Every thought, every action, every emotion, every sensation is to become manifest. I do not seek tomake work per se; I merely seek to do that which can be called work.
Nick Axel is an architect, critic, and theorist. He graduated in 2010 from the School of Architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a Bachelor of Architecture (minor in Philosophy) and is currently pursuing graduate studies at the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths / University of London. Before moving to the UK, he worked for Method Design (NYC), ELEMENTAL / Alejandro Arevena (Chile) and Vidal y Asociados Arquitectos (Madrid). His work seeks to meditate on the uniquely architectural instantiation of power as both a problem and a solution, both a question and an answer, both impossible and inevitable. He is currently researching the potential role and opportunity for architecture to act critically within the contemporary logics of oil-based urbanization in North America.
Related Links:
Nick Axel (website)
Storefront for Art and Architecture