Slog

Betsey over at Hankblog broke the news about Lead Pencil Studio: They’re winners of this year’s Rome Prize!

They’ll spend 11 months in Rome starting in September, working on a project centered around X-raying the volumes of architecturally beloved spaces using something called Lidar technology.

They explained this to me about a month ago (I was holding onto it until the academy made its announcement), but this morning I called for a review. The technology is “not exactly an X-ray, but works in a similar way,” Annie Han, one-half of LPS, said. “It’s survey equipment that sits on a tripod and is often used in mining, to see how deep a tunnel goes. We’ll be using it to map the interior spaces of the great buildings of Rome as well as the spaces between buildings.”

The interiors of the Parthenon and the cathedrals, the pockets of space in the narrow streets between huge buildings—Han and partner Daniel Mihalyo will be measuring them, capturing them, seeing “what we find out.” They’ll bring the results back to Seattle next August.

This prize is a great honor for the artists, but no surprise to me. My love for LPS is well-documented here, here, and here.

They have an installation up at the Exploratorium in San Francisco through June 3, and when I talked to them this morning they were in Colorado to give a lecture. Ten days from now, on May 3, they open their first solo exhibition at Lawrimore Project, with all new work, including installations, drawings of fictional spaces, and manipulated and documentary-style video and photography works based on Maryhill Double, their outdoor installation last summer.

It’s worth noting that Seattle artist/architects are becoming a franchise in Rome: Alex Schweder won the prize last year, and returned with all new bodies of work, including the beautiful A Sac of Rooms Three Times A Day, which recently closed at Suyama Space.