Kristin Posehn | 'Inverted Dome' at MAK Center for Art and Architecture

The MAK Center for Art and Architecture announced that they will be hosting a publication launch for Kristin Posehn’s experimental artist book “Inverted Dome” at the Schindler House on April 22, 2022. The limited-edition book was handmade and assembled by the artist in her Los Angeles studio, and features full-color documentation of her architectural sculpture, digital studies, and research process, alongside essays by writer and curator Michael Ned Holte and art critic Chris Fite-Wassilak.

The unique publication draws together the artwork and programming that unfolded during Posehn’s recent solo exhibition at the MAK Center, Mackey Garage Top. The centerpiece of both the show and book is a 6-by-6-by-6 architectural sculpture made entirely from sheets of silvery acrylic mirror. “The sculpture is this combination of virtual and physical, both conceptually and in making it,” she says. “To fabricate the piece, I used this incredible augmented reality tool called a hand-held CNC. You move the tool, and as you push it around, it moves a router blade to cut the exact path your file specifies. Working with it feels a bit like magic, and it fits this time, where we’re weaving the physical and virtual in our lives.”

While the sculpture was based on observations of the U.S. Capitol Dome, it also reimagined that source material to become open, permeable, transparent, and reflective. “The Capitol Dome is rigidly classical,” she explains. “Whereas I wanted a viewer to be able to experience a structure that’s the opposite—somehow mysterious and elusive, in constant dialog with itself and the environment. The gallery had this unusual feature where one whole wall was sliding doors and opened up to the outside. The light was constantly changing and the mirror was reflecting everything back, playing with both the sculpture and you as you moved around it.”

 A sense of meditative quiet and even spiritual dimensionality finds its way into Posehn’s sculpture. Inverted Dome was inspired in part by the California Light and Space movement, and it deftly connects the delicate phenomenology of those artworks to larger political and cultural considerations that are explored further in the publication.

Posehn’s background in experimental publishing originated with her experiences living in the Netherlands during a multi-year residency at the Jan van Eyck Academie. Reflecting on this, she says, “I learned so much from the designers I met in the Netherlands. Since moving here, I’ve been just as inspired by the tradition of artist’s books in LA. Art books are this infinitely flexible structure. And I think they can be such an important format for expanding an artwork, a meaningful way to open up and share with a wider audience beyond the limited window of a show.”

Photographed by Deborah Jaffe