Midcentury modern architectural and industrial designs emerged with an optimism in the middle decades of the 20th century, following the second world war and economic depression. It developed with a set of principles and influences that included a future-facing, functional exploration of materials, colour, shapes, and forms. Today, that design form of yore, which stood in for civic and economic reconstruction, has taken on a cultish popularity chiefly within the metropolitan millennial generation, in what I like to call the vintage-store industrial complex. There is newfound sex appeal in their minimally embellished surfaces and contours, even if its inflated vintage prices lag behind the perceived status symbol they now offer, especially for the millennial gentrifier. Ikea-esque knock-off versions made to look vintage and of that era, though doubly removed from their intended design histories, still manage to hold an appeal for sophistication. But how does this happen, and perhaps how does photography enable it? How does the proliferation of various image media perpetuate this design as a value proposition worth buying into?

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In ‘Built Persuasion’, artist Lisa Stinna-Kun leverages her sensitive awareness of the medium of photography and how it constructs perception in her series of illuminated architectural fragments from this time period. In this exhibit, public and enclosed spaces are subjects in her depictions. The sites range from auditoriums, theme parks, offices, lounge areas and even trade show set-ups. Through her distinctive acuity with cinematic lighting, composition, and visual sharpness, she feeds into the nostalgic allure of these purpose-built spaces, which seem to charm many in the present. And so in one sense, we see through the image to the functional structure by the modernist designers of that time, along with its historical sediment. In another sense, these designs dazzle, especially seen through the lightbox (an advertisement tool that mimics a screen also tethered to a specific time period and on the brink of obsolescence). They pull the viewer in, transfixing, irrespective of whatever these constructions were made for to begin with. And because they aren’t people in them, it maximizes the viewer’s propensity to project their aspirations of ownership into the space. The images are at once advertising a modernist philosophical impetus and voided of that very ideal. 

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As another dimension to the exhibit, the artist creates a conceptual correlation between the light boxes and museum habitat dioramas. These museological dioramas are also another antiquated display mechanism. In many ways, ideologically regressive, they are often positioned with a degree of objectivity for what they communicate.  They are used as cultural sites of re-enactment and narration—be it a local tableaux or of the world over (think National Geographic in 3D). In this way, these captured midcentury architectural spaces, frozen in time, yet hollowly coopted are positioned here as cultural artifacts with their own museuological diorama numbering.

  
- LUTHER KONADU, curator