Sara Graham Generator

Generator, a new body of photographic work by Vancouver-based artist Sara Graham, draws its inspiration from British architect Cedric Price’s unrealized architectural project of the same name. Conceived as a place to create, to think, and to stare, Price’s design called for timber-framed structures with varying in fill panels, cladding, and screens, to be placed upon concrete pads by computerized cranes. The buildings would learn and adapt according to users’ requirements and desires. With Price’s Generator, a building that didn’t learn didn’t change, and a building that didn’t change was boring.

The photographs in Generator expand on two of the artist’s earlier series: Department of Systems Oversight 1969 – 1973 (2006), and Conjectures (2014). Both were based upon the artistic, architectural, and philosophic considerations of the diagram; they explored and considered the unlimited possibilities of open architectural models, where form is modular and flexible. Graham’s series Generator follows Price’s work in the production of imagined structures, hers represented photographically in a seemingly endless number of configurations. Each large-format photograph pushes towards abstraction as the architectural structure reveals itself within and between the different configurations across the series.