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"Corridors no longer simply link A to B but have become ‘destinations.’ … All perspective is gone … The formerly straight is coiled into evermore complex configurations."
Rem Koolhaas, Junkspace, 2001
Two paintings of hallways stand at either end of the inclining gallery, establishing a directional field in which passage is staged. Between them, two monolithic forms composed of a layered wooden parquetry suggest an endless linear architecture, where a sequence of horizontal elements accumulates into a vertical axis. For the exhibition Second Interior at International Waters, artists Olivia Drusin and Steph Gonzalez-Turner relate movement through architecture as a condition of subjectivity: the linear passage as a psychic relay that reorganizes that which passes through it.
Architecture changes with movement; its connections and folds produce transitions that divide space through difference and repetition, articulating thresholds where interior and exterior, image and structure, begin to collapse into one another. Transitional spaces (hallways, vestibules, tunnels) organize passage, directing movement between connected points. Within these spaces, the body is reorganized. No longer anchored to the identity of a room, the body is reduced to a bounded unit of movement, aligned and guided by spatial constraint. The hallway temporarily reassigns the body its position, suspending it between fixed identities and producing a subject in transit.
Olivia Drusin’s diptychs My Apartment and de Chirico’s Apartment depict the end of two hallways from inverted perspectives: one from above, the other from below. Saturated in technicolor green with red inflections, these interiors destabilize orientation, situating the viewer between image and architecture. Drawing from her visit last year to Giorgio de Chirico’s apartment, Drusin sets his space against her own, producing a doubled interior in which her lived experience is brought into relation with that of the canonical painter. The corridor becomes a site of projection, where the mobile subject is caught within its own spatial image.
Steph Gonzalez Turner’s sculptures, entitled Chlorophyll and Pin Quartz, translate linear passage into vertical accumulation and compression. Composed of tightly joined wooden pieces, their Scheele’s green surface is defined by the exposed and painted endgrain of each wooden layer, forming a patterned facade that reads as both structure and surface. As the tessellated constructions stretch upwards, the stacked forms produce their own movement and direction, determined by the constraints and logic of their construction. As condensed passages, the architectons produce a kind of vertical drift: the proliferation of implied corridors that repeat and multiply, legible only at their outermost surface, like a glass curtain-wall skyscraper encountered from the outside, or a layered sequence suspended in its own ascent.
As movement through architecture reorganizes the body, architecture also bears the imprint of the bodies that move through it. Here, architecture reflects the subject that inhabits it, but never transparently. For both artists, space is conditioned by the subject, foregrounding the synthetic character of its surroundings. The artists’ shared use of green recalls the chromatic lighting in Hitchcock’s Vertigo, where color functions as a spatialization of artifice and desire, producing a recursive movement that echoes the film's harmonograph spiral. As the subject projects itself onto its constructed environment, it simultaneously absorbs its structure, generating a reciprocal condition in which psychological experience and constructed space are co-constitutive. What emerges is a continuous interior in which perception is inseparable from the architectures that structure it.
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