Figure 1 (6 Work Surfaces) by Katy Barkan
This image is from a series of studies for the project “6 Work Surfaces” installed at the UCLA galleries in 2019. The work considers the white gallery walls—and their attendant posture of authority and neutrality— and juxtaposes it with a series of noncompliant red carpeted projections that challenge the hegemony of these forms. Instead the installation puts forward reshuffled hierarchies of support and display, form and representation, materialism and abstraction, ground and ornament, allowing for category errors, transpositions, and irresoluble differences to coexist.
Materials: Digital Print, Unframed
About Katy Barkan:
Katy Barkan is a Los Angeles-based designer and a faculty member of UCLA’s School of Architecture and Urban Design where she has been teaching since 2014. She is the principal of Now Here, an award-winning practice working at the intersection of the speculative and the everyday. Formed in 2017, the office is interested in the reciprocity between ideas and things and plays out these frictions through a range of scales (residential, commercial, installation, and objects) to generate alternative engagements with architecture. Katy received the Rome Prize in Architecture at the American Academy in Rome in 2020. She has exhibited her work at the Venice Biennale, the UCLA galleries, and at the American Academy in Rome. Her built projects and writing have been published in Architectural Record, Architect’s Newspaper, Pool, Clog, and Log Magazine.
Before joining the faculty of UCLA, Katy taught at Harvard’s GSD where she also received her M.Arch.
