Bianca Weeko Martin
The White House
Bianca Weeko Martin
The White House
The White House
→ Commended Theses
About
Supervisor:
Philip Beesley
Anne Bordeleau
Contemporary emplacement demands movement, whether through migration, travel, or exchange of ideas. Identity, as positioned by the postcolonial writer Edouard Glissant, is thus linked fundamentally with change and contact with others. And yet, the loss that these forms of movement demand begs the question of what—in the most ancestral depths of our being—still remains. Facing these depths, the idea of home offers a metaphor for grounding. The White House is my father’s ancestral house in Baliuag, the Philippines. The White House tells a story of a dwelling imbricated within both national and nationless histories.
Through the representational forms of drawing, writing and digital space—media that I offer in response to the physical house—the architecture and the histories it embodies take on new lives across time and geographic location. The topology of a palimpsest becomes the source of inspiration for a drawing series of the White House, extending the tradition of architectural drawing and culminating with a large-scale canvas panel mounted and installed for public view in Toronto, Canada. In tandem, interactions between the palimpsest’s layers begin to suggest a contemporary framework for thinking about urban history.
Through the representational forms of drawing, writing and digital space—media that I offer in response to the physical house—the architecture and the histories it embodies take on new lives across time and geographic location. The topology of a palimpsest becomes the source of inspiration for a drawing series of the White House, extending the tradition of architectural drawing and culminating with a large-scale canvas panel mounted and installed for public view in Toronto, Canada. In tandem, interactions between the palimpsest’s layers begin to suggest a contemporary framework for thinking about urban history.
