Mundane construction materials combine in the local vernacular. The urban characters of São Paulo, where this series was created, and Brasilia, permeate the works via materials, form, and process. Brazilian high modernism's "space age" buildings were made using the simplest materials: wooden forms, steel bars, poured concrete, and a massive supply of laborers, swelling around construction sites, the evidence of whose hands was later erased through seamless, scale-less finishing.
In Workers 1-7, Vieira cast concrete and rebar in cardboard tube forms commonly used for quick, inexpensive casting of load-bearing support columns. These Workers hang in exhausted contrapposto. Blocks 1-16 are the same dimensions as the two most common concrete blocks used in Brazil and the U.S. Cast from an amalgam of concrete and scrap materials from the Workers and their Block predecessors, they’re then lightly worked, carved, or painted, creating a feedback loop of materiality within the studio. They sit on the floor; we tower over them. They are the blocks that build our buildings, the blocks that form our cities, the unit form and the whole, material and architecture.
Artist Allyson Vieira lives and works in New York City. Her work spans the fields of sculpture and architecture, inquiring into their materials, craft, economy, history, and politics. She has exhibited extensively both internationally and in the U.S., including institutional projects at Kunsthalle Basel, Swiss Institute, Storm King Art Center, PinchukArtCentre, Fall River MoCA, Frieze Projects, The Public Art Fund, The Highline, and SculptureCenter. Her book of interviews with Greek master marble carvers, On the Rock: The Acropolis Interviews, is available from Soberscove Press, Chicago. She is Assistant Professor of Foundations at the Corcoran School of Art and Design at The George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Vieira is represented by Daniel Faria Gallery in Toronto, Canada.
Re: Work Over Time was exhibited at Daniel Faria Gallery in Toronto, Canada from September 9 - October 28, 2017. The work was produced during a two-month residency in São Paulo, Brazil, and exhibited at Mendes Wood DM from from August 15 - September 25, 2015.