denny dimin gallery installation

denny dimin gallery
new york, ny

Honorable Mention AIA Seattle 2019 Honor Awards

The installation at the Denny Dimin Gallery in New York, NY represents a unique collaboration between the architects and artist Luke Diiorio. In an effort to create a dialogue between space, architecture, and the works displayed, we worked closely with the artist to create an immersive environment to experience the art.

Three volumes are inserted into the existing gallery to house the art. Each volume itself creates a dialogue between the others and with the existing building:

The first volume lifts the veil off of the storefront, allowing passersby to experience the space, and almost projecting out of the storefront and onto the sidewalk. Its open nature blurs the fourth wall of the gallery and engages the sidewalk and street.

The second volume is rotated both in plan and section. The floor is sloped five degrees to the natural world, however, the walls and paintings in the space are all constructed and displayed relative to the slope, creating an unevenness while in the room. Apertures in this volume reveal to the user the source of this unevenness by creating a frame of reference to the normal vertical.

The third volume at the back of the is considered the most elevated and refined space. Square in proportion and level with the world, this volume is rotated within the existing space. This rotation, however, is only apparent when entering the volume from the second, where the two rooms engage a column at one moment, revealing the crux of the system.

The act of elevation throughout this experience is tied closely to the art and is apparent in the way the art is displayed. Large niches within each room elevate the artwork from simply being hung on a wall to being prominently displayed within its own volume. In some cases, the art is hung within the niche, and in others the art is displayed on a shelf.

The rotation of each volume relative to the gallery and in relation to the other volumes creates a dialogue between all four elements, and allows visitors to access this interstitial underbelly between rooms. Plywood was used in an effort to contrast the art, while at the same time being materially grounded in the world. The construction technique is deliberately exposed on the backside of each volume creating a clean finished space within each room, while revealing its underbelly on the back side and within the interstitial space between volumes.

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Luke Diiorio was born in 1983 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and lives in Virginia and New York. Diiorio received his MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art in London and his BA in Philosophy from Lehigh University. The artist has had solo exhibitions at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London; Sunday-S Gallery, Copenhagen; and Art Basel Hong Kong, with Pippy Houldsworth Gallery. Diiorio’s work has been featured or reviewed in The Brooklyn Rail, Art in America, Interview, The Wall Street Journal, and The New York Times.