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Australian National Veterans Arts Museum

#310SKR

Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) | Fall 2017

Programs: Hand Sketching, Photography, Photoshop, AutoCAD, Illustrator, Indesign, Modeling, Research
Duration: 4 months
Phases: Theory - Research - Concept Design - Programming

Summary

The Australian National Veterans Arts Museum (ANVAM) is an organization created in 2015 that provides art-based programs for current and former members of the Australian military services along with their families; specifically those who suffer from PTSD. ANVAM is looking to create a community space at 310 St Kilda Road in Melbourne, Australia for the veterans to display their work. This project creates new thresholds for veterans to move forward from their experiences of war through the use of creating and displaying art to depict, commemorate, and validate their experiences while serving.

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This project explores space and time through the lens of a threshold. Thresholds are defined as  “entering or beginning to create a sense of ambiguity through a particular context”. These thresholds are explored physically and perceptually throughout this project. The factors of these thresholds are defined by the identity of the site and push the users beyond the threshold into a new space, experience, or way of thinking.

Design Inspiration

The first phase of this project involved analyzing and learning about museum spaces in relation to preservation, restoration, and reuse. Each of these precedents explores different techniques of analyzing materiality through spaces (specifically gallery space). Looking at artists such as Dan Graham and Alecja Kwade, I began looking at their techniques of addressing hard vs soft surfaces within the location of their work. Both create threshold experiences physically and perceptually through their designs by reflecting and refracting of the view creates an ambience of remembering the past by seeing where you have been, while having the ability to see forward to the future.

Alicja Kwade | Berlin, Germany

Artist | 2017

Thresholds

Thresholds are defined as “a place of entering or beginning to create a sense of ambiguity within the context”. Inspired by Aleja Kwade and Dan Graham, this collage emphasizes the effects of reflecting and refracting light and images to create physical and perceptual thresholds.

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To relate to ANVAM, thresholds are connected to two main ideas: identity and beyond. Identity is defined as the individual or distinct characteristics of a person or community while beyond is defined as outside the understanding of, happening, or continuing after a specific time, stage, or event.

Analyzing The White Cube (Parti Diagram Process)

At the start the semester, I read Brian O'Doherty's "Inside the White Cube" (1986) to learn more about the traditional gallery space. From looking at the text, I extracted quotes to further explore the ideologies of gallery spaces. I then interpreted the quotes visually into diagrams. After analyzing the quotes, I took these interpretations of the gallery space to challenge the idea of the white cube in the modern context through vairous mediums.

“The outside world must not come in. The art is free... to take on its own life” (O’Doherty 7).

We use white space to express and display our own artifacts; “a relentless habit of self-definition. The defining of self means the purposeful neglect of all that is other than self. ” (O’Doherty 11).

The purpose is to appear “untouched by time and its vicissitude”. The condition of appearing “out of time or beyond time” (O’Doherty 7).

Analyzing The White Cube (3D Translation)
Design Process
Design Development Currently in Progress. Check back once a week throughout October for more updates!
Early Design Proposals
Programming & Parti Diagram
Final Design Proposal
Ni Man Sakana
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