Noah Loesberg

Statement

Architecture is rich with cultural intentions. In my work I represent what I experience in the built environment. I am interested in the objects, structures, and decorative devices that we navigate daily, those of the living room, the hallway, and the street outside. Although facades are usually what we think about when architecture is mentioned, looking at buildings is more akin to viewing mountains or forests; The man made structures seem to arise like feats of nature. I focus on a much lower order of minutia, the smaller details of interior design and street level construction, where our interactions with architecture are personal. I start with a familiar object, and through shifts in scale, materials and context lead to varying levels of abstraction.

Examples of my work include a street curb which wraps the base of the gallery walls and can’t be stepped over, a huge smoke detector which quietly intones weather reports, and a radiator which uses the ironic visual warmth of wood instead of actual heat.

I approach my sculpture as a set of substitutions; materials stand in for other materials, forms for other forms, at varying levels of dissonance or consonance. In this way, I like to think of my work as a parallel architecture, referring to building standards and types of buildings, rather than specific structures, places, or times. Connections are subtle or suggested and remain ambiguous.