Training Setting, 2017
Bibliowicz Family Gallery
College of Architecture, Art, and Planning, Cornell University
Ithaca, NY
October 11 - November 17, 2017
Featured in Interface Critique Journal, Vol. 1 (2018)
This exhibition presents collaborative work by Maria Park and Branden Hookway that investigates
social and control protocols using a diagrammatic language of flight cockpits and table settings.
To train within a technologized environment is to mediate both formal and informal instruction --
where a formal understanding of information and procedure coexists with a tacit knowledge of embodied action.
In this sense, training is inherently an orientation toward both the actual and the virtual,
as performance draws upon informal knowledge according to formalized protocols. The exhibition
explores this hybrid state of training through a series of paintings, sculptures, and drawings.
Central to this exhibition is Training Setting, an installation of 26 shaped paintings depicting an
airfield seen through the windscreen of a grounded B-29. The curvature of the horizon line across the
peripheral field frames an oculus with an inactive Norden bombsight at its center, neutralizing the
strategic bomber's view of the world as a target. 136 is a wall-mounted sculpture based on an exterior
view of the Enola Gay's windscreen. Layered with interlocking pieces of Plexiglas and wood, its
opaque black surface refers to the difficulty of separating out the place of this historical artifact
in the lineage of contemporary techniques of picturing the world through satellite imagery and global
communication. The Setting series are reverse paintings of table settings behind transparent
polycarbonate sheets that attempt to dehierarchize social codes that organize the formal and the
informal. While the vernacular of diagrams found in manuals and instructional guides delimit a set
of conditions and actions, their reconfiguration here addresses how the systems of control that
underlie formal diagrams are propagated through everyday life. The exhibition seeks to bring a
heightened awareness of controlled environments and to mediate the tension between structured information
and intuitive decisions.
Work from this exhibition will be included in a Berlin-based journal, Interface Critique, in fall
2017 and will travel to San Francisco for a solo exhibition at Nancy Toomey Fine Art in spring 2018.
Branden Hookway teaches at Cornell University in the Department of Architecture and the Department of
Information Science, has worked in architecture, art, and graphic design. He is the author of
Pandemonium: The Rise of Predatory Locales in the Postwar World (Princeton Architectural Press, 1999)
and Interface (MIT Press, 2014).
