The multi-disciplinary collaborative Lead Pencil Studio presents “Suspended Collapse,” an online exhibition that explores their emerging aesthetic of structures hovering at the edge of visual perception and structural possibility. Lead Pencil Studio employs sculpture, drawing, models, photography, and writing. The combined body of work probes a subject overlooked and under-explored in the field of architecture. Exhibiting projects and proposals that illustrate qualities ordinarily defined as weak, frail, near-collapse, ephemeral, peripheral, and barely perceptible – the spatial explorations by Lead Pencil Studio define an entirely new territory of architectural possibility as distinct from a discipline that is otherwise defined by firmness, solidity, and certainty.

As a single subject inquiry, the topics approached in “Suspended Collapse” are new to the field and have not previously been isolated for in-depth exploration. Gordon Matta-Clark explored a new frontier of space using the tools of dissection, demolition, and extraction. Gabriel Orozco showed us the accidental intentions inherent in photographs which gave form to his photo-collages and dreamlike sculptures. The discipline of architecture, focused as it has been on issues of late modernism, has pursued concerns of material honesty, clear forms, solidity, transparency and problem-solving certainty.

Lead Pencil Studio’s practice has quietly explored projects without finality, working in-between contemporary art and architecture and with particular focus on issues of social, environmental, behavioral, and spatial concerns. “Suspended Collapse” will deepen and expand this progress with an in-depth exploration of an architecture counter to the inherited Western canon– an architecture of flux, incompletion, and fragility.