Zero Waste Installation at MCA Inspired by a Painting by Youssofzay + Hart.

Sydney-based architecture studio Youssofzay + Hart have recently completed an installation design for the MCA’s exhibition ‘Vivienne Binns: On and through the Surface’, the first retrospective of the artist, presented in Partnership with the Monash University Museum of Art.

The design intervention involves a series of steel armatures that occupy interstitial zones within the Level 3 galleries. The armatures are designed to hold the delicate archival content, tracing 60 years of work by one of Australia’s important feminist artists. Taking inspiration from Binns’ 1993 painting ‘Surfacing in the Pacific’, the design extracts the grid overlay and applies it to the installation’s framework. The painting—on show at the gallery—sits within the major sightline established along the gallery spine.

The armatures act as an abstraction of these grid forms—thin, lithe lines of steel replacing the painted lines with the diagonals borrowed and appropriated to form lateral bracing. The plywood inserts reference the landscape moments within the painting while holding significant archival content.

As the visitor approaches the painting, its abstracted grid is read more clearly against the lines of the armatures. The forms weave through the in-between, under-utilised pockets of the gallery spaces forming windows and connections across rooms.

Youssofzay + Hart took a zero-waste approach to the project which they intend to implement across all future temporary cultural installations. In this case, the armatures have been designed to transform into desk cases for ongoing use by the gallery and the plywood panels have been salvaged and repaired from the previous exhibition at the MCA.

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[Images courtesy of Youssofzay + Hart.]