UNDER CONSTRUCTION
Gabriel Feld is an architect, an artist, and a teacher. His artwork--printmaking and installation--has been exhibited in China, Europe, the US and Argentina. He has been a professor at Rhode Island School of Design since 1990, serving as head of the architecture department (1997-2002) and chief critic of the European Honors Program in Rome (2014-16.) He has also taught at China Academy of Art, Dessau Institute of Architecture, Universidad Torcuato Di Tella, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Boston Architectural Center and Universidad de Buenos Aires. His teaching includes design studios and lecture courses dealing with urban culture, as well as other cultural and artistic concerns. His architecture practice both in his native Argentina and in the United States has involved residential and institutional projects, large-scale affordable housing, industrialized construction, urban design and transportation. He received his Architecture Diploma from the Universidad de Buenos Aires in 1980 and his Master in Architecture from Harvard University in 1988.
I think of my prints as little poems without words. But more than conveying a message, they try to share a material experience, almost a tactile sensibility. They are constructed with different kinds of materials, some from everyday life--such as paper, string, nets, fabric, ribbons, and rubber bands--and others from nature in the city, like petals of fallen flowers, leaves, and twigs. Their inspiration often comes from the traces we leave behind as we go about our lives. I am simply amazed by the power and beauty of those marks, many casual and unintended, ephemeral, and evanescent. And to be candid, I could be perfectly content just by looking at them. Yet, I do my prints as a way to dwell on those observations a little longer, and to share them.
I am an architect, so when I use the word “constructed” I don’t do it casually, since I think of printmaking as extension of my work as an architect, something like “architecture by other means” if you wish.