Jeff Carter
The Michael Reese Hospital campus in Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood once included eight buildings with known design collaboration by Walter Gropius, built between 1947 and 1959. As the founder of Germany’s Bauhaus school of design (1919-1933), Gropius is widely considered to be one of the most influential architects in modern history. In its bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics, the City of Chicago bought the defunct hospital and in 2009 began to demolish the structures to make way for the proposed Olympic Village. Despite the eventual failure of the city’s bid, and the efforts of an international consortium of scholars, preservationists and architects, the buildings continued to be demolished. Today, only the Singer Pavilion (also known as the Psychiatric and Psychosomatic Institute) remains standing, but is abandoned and severely deteriorated. In 2017 it was listed as a “Most Endangered Historic Place” in Illinois, and the otherwise vacant site is now slated for redevelopment.
Psychosomatic Texture Maps (2021) and Floorplan Stickers (2022) are two recent elements of my ongoing project, The Singer Pavilion.
Psychosomatic Texture Maps is a series of 6 images printed on PhotoTex and adhered directly to the wall. The images were generated from an aerial 3D photogrammetry scan of the vacant building and its immediate surroundings. The resulting 3D point cloud describes the volumetric form but does not account for the visible surface characteristics, which are captured as TIFFs. This process separates these elements into distinct file types, forcing the 3-dimensional building onto a 2-dimensional surface in ways that do not correspond to how it was built, how it will be demolished, or the materials that it is comprised of. Here, the Singer Pavilion is unbuilt according to an unseen digital imperative.
Psychosomatic Texture Maps 1-6, 2021. 36″ x 36″, Color ink jet print on PhotoTex.
Floorplan Stickers is a series of site interventions composed of adhesive vinyl in various colors. The cut-out profile of each 2.75″ x 3.5″ vinyl sticker is a digital trace from the original 1947 floorplan of the Singer Pavilion, with one color to represent each of the 6 floors of the building. Combinations of negative and positive layers are loosely constructed on signs, mailboxes, lamp posts and other outdoor fixtures in the general vicinity of the abandoned hospital. Quietly occupying human spaces in the community most directly impacted by the loss of the psychiatric hospital, these small compositions suggest the breakdown of order and purpose dictated by the original architect’s floorplans.
Floorplan Stickers 1-4, 2022. Installation view, adhesive vinyl.
Jeff Carter is a multimedia artist living and working in Chicago, IL. He is a Professor of Art, Media and Design at DePaul University. Jeff earned his BFA at the University of Colorado, Boulder and his MFA at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Jeff has exhibited his work in Chicago at the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Renaissance Society, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and the Hyde Park Art Center. His work has been shown internationally at the Hayward Gallery, London; the Kunsthalle Hamburg, Germany; the Kaohsiung Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan; and the Lewis Glucksman Gallery, University College Cork, Ireland. His solo shows include the DePaul Art Museum, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, IL and Leipzig, Germany; Spencer Brownstone Gallery, New York, New York; and The Mission, Chicago, IL. His work was recently reviewed in Art in America and profiled in the 7th edition of Bauhaus Magazine.