Improbable

Integrating painting and digital media, my work is about the invisible boundaries and relationships between culture, architecture and individuals’ perception. As an immigrant, I am interested in ways in which we move through public spaces as perpetual travelers.

By reversing a familiar architectural experience of being a user, inhabitant, or a by-passer of built spaces, Improbable Architecture puts the viewer in a place of a voyeur, surveyor, planner and potentially architect.  In these micro installations, I combine suspended blueprint drawings, projections, lights and reflective materials that manipulate and disorient clear distinctions between walls, floor and ceiling.  The resulting architecture appears not to be supported by solid structures and walls that delineate territories, but rather remind of a disorienting feeling of perceiving a landscape and its perfect reflection in a lake, or like penetrating a pool of water.  The viewers are invited to cross the periphery of being a foreigner and dream-walk into the installation.

Blueprints for Impractical Architecture works draw from the fields of geometry and psychology as well as implications of new Internet based concepts: cyberspace and virtual communities representing the era of hyper-reality and simulation.  Emptied of their use these environments reflect anxieties, distortions and alienations born out of our experience within institutional space and at the same time become rooms for introspective inhabiting as if the distance between viewer’s personal experiences, the rooms within psychic imagination and the illusion of constructed architecture is blurred.

Below is an excerpt from Alison Bing’s review of Past Lives Personal Exorcisms Exhibition: “…It’s the feeling you might get watching your video game avatar enter an endless hallway , or shaking a snow globe containing the Seattle Space Needle inside the Seattle Space Needle gift shop.  The uneasy parallels Shterenberg posits here suggest a fractal geometry of human experience, revealing linkages among seeming difference as well as difference among seeming linkages.   Any work with the audacity to play conceptual poker with Einstein and Derrida and then up the ante deserves the title Improbable”