JENCKSIANAGRAM

Jencksianagram is an exhibition at The Cosmic House in London. The House is a Grade 1 listed building designed by Maggie Keswick and Charles Jencks modified from a late-Georgian house. The Cosmic House remains one of the most notable examples of post-modern architecture in the UK. It is currently used as an archive, museum and exhibition space open to the public. Jencksianagram comprises a number of works: stereographic slides, a set of viewers, a small publication and sculpture.

 

Housed in the Slidescrapers of the Architectural Library, Charles’ slide collection was a versatile image library which he used and reused to illustrate his lectures and publications. As an archive it allows us to see the world and its architecture through Charles’ eyes, while retaining its flexibility as a visual resource which can be reconfigured to present new perspectives and meanings, and new anagrams of Jencks’ archive. For the past year, artist Adam Knight has methodically viewed every one of the thousands of slides in the Slidescrapers. Drawn to The Cosmic House’s recurring motif of mirrors, Knight identified near-duplicates in the archive and used them to assemble stereograms – a pair of almost identical two-dimensional images displayed side-by-side in a stereoscopic viewer, which the brain perceives as a three-dimensional image. Since these images would have been taken by Charles sequentially, the resulting accidental stereograms potentially allow us to not only perceive an additional third dimension, but also the fourth dimension of time.

 

Interview with M-A (A Space Between) 

‘A Space Between Spatial and Temporal’

 

Jencksianagram

The Cosmic House, London. Autumn/Winter 2024

Photo: Thierry Bal