BODY BUILDERS: Emily Speed
October 21 – December 3, 2016
For her first exhibition in Texas, British artist Emily Speed premiered a sculptural installation and film made during a residency with the Art Galleries at TCU that continued her exploration of the relationship between people and architecture. Speed is interested in how people are shaped by the buildings they occupy and how a person inhabits their own psychological space.
In the context of an American college campus, these considerations encountered the influence of classical architecture accompanied by symbolic implications of power, authority and erudition. There is a strong history of such building, dating back to the early 1800s with Thomas Jefferson’s Palladian designs for the University of Virginia, and at Texas Christian University there are numerous examples of classical style found in modern buildings that continue this tradition.
Emily Speed presented new works in response to this strategy of using the past in the present. A hybrid structure of architectural furniture, her sculptural installation used various classical forms to create a façade that became a site of display where small-scale clay models suggest a soft remaking or reimagining of monumental stone buildings. Symbolically, the edifice acted as a threshold to the film, reminiscent of the delineation of sacred and secular space found in a Roman temple.
Speed’s film, featuring students from TCU’s School of Classical and Contemporary Dance, focused on themes circling power, gender and status through the use of classical architectural forms. Employing the caryatid as a key protagonist - - a draped female figure in carved stone used as a supportive pillar in an ancient classical building - - the film explored the symbolic meaning and language of architecture through an abstract narrative. Significantly, here Speed’s caryatid was liberated from her traditional weight-bearing, static role and as such BODY BUILDERS offered a prescient comment on the position of contemporary women in the academy.
Film stills courtesy of the artist
Installation images by Kevin Todora
