John Singer Sargent’s El Jaleo painting has loosely been my favourite painting ever since the first time I saw it. I’m sure it’s clear by now that I have a predilection towards abstract painting, but I can assert that there’s no other painting I can think of - both abstract or representational - that holds that same degree of gesture and an imbuement of rhythm and sound as does El Jaleo. 

Abstract Expressionism and Post-Painterly abstraction have fundamentally changed the way I look at design, and they have given me hundreds of gestural precedents that I can use (and have already begun to use) in architecture school. I’ve learned so much about Nietzsche and Greek tragedy through Jackson Pollock and Cy Twombly’s work. I can recognize, compare, and contrast my positionality versus that of my ancestors by looking at both of our art respectively. My theory of history is vast and unforgiving because art history has fundamentally changed my definition of what it means to be human. 

Just as he captioned in an instagram post leading up to the instillation “POV: your imagination outgrew the box,” it really feels as though the conviction showcased in his paintings has become so big that the figures are jumping out of the canvas. Now his memory and identity are in the same plane as the viewer, no longer to be imagined but to be interacted with (a very literal example of concepts becoming things). 

Urban Media Lab gave us a taste of architecture; a double-edged sword. ‘A kiss and a slap.’ The studio, our new home, is a bubbling hub for making things but also a vacuum for sleep. It is an incredible feeling to be constantly surrounded by people who are just as passionate as you are about what you love, but with that, dissonance is inevitable. 

Pictured on the thumbnail is Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I; an artwork which has become an allegorical portrait of myself as i’ve been stepping into this new chapter of my life. The winged designer in the portrait is surrounded by scientific tools and paraphernalia and is seemingly frozen in contemplation; an understandable motif for the renaissance period. Similarly, Ive been paralyzed in anticipation over my incoming start of the faculty of architecture. I’m walking away from the humanities and towards a more stem-adjacent field where stress is a certainty. The dream of doing architecture and design clashes against this stale, profit-worshipping zeitgeist that design students like me are unlucky enough to be a part of. 

it sucks that whenever we — and I mean guys that look like me — do anything that’s genre-bending or that’s anything, they always put it in a rap or urban category, which is — I don’t like that ‘urban’ word. That’s just a politically correct way to say the n-word to me.” he said.

I’m not writing this cause I’m pro-AI, nor simply to be contrarian, but because AI is so ubiquitous that we virtually have no choice but to try and steer its positionality in Art towards the most ‘ethical’ direction. Believe me, I stand with the masses on this issue and pride myself in not using generative AI for anything. However, with a ‘medium’ – if we are willing to call AI such a thing – so fresh and pervasive, there is almost no limit to the ways in which we can stretch it and eventually destroy it from within.

In this essay I will closely read Harlow Flow, Jules Olitski’s 1963 painting. I will pay close attention to the right side of the painting to try and enunciate its ebullience and its internal conflict which Michael Fried’s Three American Painters essay speaks to in Olitski’s oeuvre more broadly.

“Art reveals to us our capacity for meaning making in the absence of traditional authority, in the absence of God, in the absence of some divine ordering of the world, art reveals to us that we are capable of being divine. We are capable of doing that which God previously did.”

“… Is this not a casting call for architects? Imagine a world where we can explore, confront, and redefine billions of perspectives of knowledge, virtues, behavior, and the human condition through architecture.”

Earlier this year, I had the opportunity to visit the office of my favourite architecture firm. The firm in question, of course, is none other than 5468796 Architecture; Winnipeg’s very own world-renowned architecture firm created by U of M alumni Johanna Hurrme, Sasa Radulovic, and Colin Neufeld. While there...