Miguel and Hope share a curiosity about place and memory—in their respective practices, they play with spatial manipulation through image and material. They both seek to develop a language around the perception of space and its significance to community and self. This reconstruction of space is where they simultaneously celebrate and question narrative and meaning in the architectural landscape.
Miguel and Hope both received their BFAs from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018.
WORKSHOPS WITH ENVISION UNLIMITED
Hope and Miguel worked in a cycle where each weekly session formed in response to the previous weeks iteration considering how memory, texture, material, pattern overlay each other in the structure of our lived environments. They created textured clay plates whose impressions were sourced from various surfaces around Westtown Center. Attendees made rubbing drawings from these plates that would later be heat-pressed into a collective wall piece, composed much like brick-laying. They also directed people’s intuitions through color and texture when making their own textured plates to create paper reliefs. In the final workshop, these textured drawings were scanned and printed as transparencies for the group to cut and collage their own compositions to expose on light sensitive paper.
STUDIO
Hope and Miguel’s studio time integrated the same visual and tactile exercises as the workshops. Photos of space were printed out, cut and collaged, exposed as cyanotypes and embossed with architectural textures. Using the workshops as an idea incubator, they served as direct inspiration for how Hope and Miguel explored their collaborative studio practice during the residency.