Designed and built by MARC FORNES/THEVERYMANY, and installed at Miami Art Basel for a three-year period, the spatial artwork Labrys Frisae blurs the distinction between edge and space. Despite that it’s made from aluminum less than 1 mm thick, the finish installation could sustain live test loads of three people walking on its top.
The piece earns initial attention as a visual icon -- unique in its form, structure and ornamentation. Yet, consistent with the other temporary and permanent structures coming out of the New York City-based studio, the project’s lasting impression comes from its spatial effect.
Labrys Frisae provides an immersive, multisensorial experience. The intensive curvature of its surface blurs the understanding of edge and space, betraying the relatively straightforward geometry of its triangular plan.
The structure’s interior leads a visitor to lose their time as they peruse the curves and try to understand the space, which is altered upon moving through. At night, the perception is changed further from the play of shadow that emerge through the intricate perforation completely covering the skin of the shell.
The installation extends the studio’s research into the relationship between a surface and a network, and adds to the ‘striped morphologies’ project family invented by Fornes. In this body of research, projects are described as stripes, nested on flat sheets of material and cut, then attached to one another with thousands of rivets, finding curvature as they are joined to their neighbors. The design process is an exhaustive series of trials, errors, conclusions and reboots, met by an assembly process that is meticulous and hands-on.
Once complete, Labrys Frisae is self-supporting. (The piece wraps around a column standing in its middle, but does not actually utilize the column structurally.) Though the visual effect is ornate, Fornes’ systematic objective is a minimalist one -- unify surface, skin, structure, ornament and spatial experience into a single system.
