The Gallery at Heimbold Visual Arts Center is delighted to present Granite and Rainbows, an exhibition by New Affiliates. This exhibition will be open to the Sarah Lawrence community from September 16 – October 24, 2021 at the gallery’s location at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, NY.
Granite is as flexible in its use as it is hard in its form. It’s everywhere! From monuments to memorials, skyscrapers to kitchens—it is ground, wall, skin and foundation all at once. We think of granite when we think of tombstones just as we think of it when we think of countertops. Honed, it shines bright like wealth and 20th century finance. Rough, it registers as rusticated, old, stoic, and stately. Granite is made heavy by cultural value and expectation. It oscillates from two dimensional surface to three-dimensional form, from painting to sculpture.
Virginia Woolf famously paired granite with rainbow to create a distinction between reality and imagination, hard facts and ephemeral dreams. We’re looking for a granite rainbow, a simultaneous collision of the two conditions into one. This show presents another look at granite, both as material and as media. We present it as grandly historical and forgettably omnipresent, as a means to revisit some of our designs through a thin-solid material re-rendering of form, and as a material that has had a rough transition from a glorious past to a rather abject present. We look at granite as cultural object, architectural surface, and imaginary signifier.
About New Affiliates
New Affiliates was founded in 2016 by Ivi Diamantopoulou and Jaffer Kolb. As a design office, the studio works with clients internationally on residential, institutional, and commercial projects ranging from ground-up constructions to historical renovations. At the same time, they look to initiate projects and collaborations that focus on matters of reuse within a context of material excess, particularly as it relates to current standards of practice. They have collaborated with various branches of the New York City government, including the Departments of Sanitation and Parks and Recreation. Their work has been awarded and published internationally, and they have been exhibited at PERFORMA, the Venice Biennial, Storefront for Art and Architecture and A83 among others.
Project team: Ivi Diamantopoulou, Jaffer Kolb, Nashwah Ahmed, Noah Fritsch, and Austin McInnis.
Image: Courtesy New Affiliates