Jeremy
Beaudry
Artist/Designer
Philadelphia, U.S.
Link: Meaning
Building
Submission: "Provisional
Monument"
The motivation for the project, "Provisional Monument," comes from
several years of thinking about architecture as a material and
conceptual reality (a real space in a real place) where meaning happens,
where meaning matters, when I (or you, or we) filter the
stuff of creative, constructive, lived experience through the mesh
of all the cultural and individual memories of architectural
experience. A chance encounter with an anonymous, unfinished building
gave me an overwhelming sense of freedom in my thinking about architecture
and place and how buildings tacitly circumscribe explicit and implicit
social interactions. If architecture cannot flourish in the imagination,
if architecture cannot accommodate the vastness of our architectural
memories both as individuals and communities, then we suffer a deficit
of meaning in our engagement with the buildings we inhabit. Perhaps,
then, buildings must retain a degree of “unfinished-ness” in
order to allow for the provisional meanings that come from creative
experience guided by the inspiration and familiarity of memory.
Jeremy Beaudry is an interdisciplinary artist, musician, and designer currently living and working in Philadelphia. He holds a BFA from the Tyler School of Art and a graduate degree in architecture from the University of Texas at Austin. Most recently he has taught courses in the arts and humanities at Danville Area Community College in Illinois and served as co-director and co-curator at an alternative art space called OPENSOURCE Art. In the summer of 2005 he was an artist-in-residence at the Karl Hofer Gesellschaft in Berlin, Germany. Areas of interest and research include: architecture, contemporary notions of place, vernacular landscapes, urban cityscapes, visual culture, the intersection of critical theory and practice, and memory as a constructive agent in the production of meaning.
“Wal-Mart 2006 plans: 530 new stores, 55 million square feet”
“Wal-Mart 2005 Annual Report: ‘Vested Interest,’” HYPERLINK "http://walmartstores.com/Files/2005AnnualReport.pdf" (accessed February 1, 2006).