RTS would like to welcome our July/August resident, Becky Alprin, an artist based in Oakland. Alprin’s process involves the languages of architectural model making and topographic mapping, both of which are simplified ways to depict complex forms of great scale. These reductive languages make vast things comprehensible and reveal patterns, lending the perspective of an archeologist in the distant future. Blended with geologic concepts deployed as metaphor, Alprin creates landscapes and cityscapes of indeterminate health set in ambiguous time.
During her residency at RTS, Alprin plans to continue work on the ongoing Cross Section Map series. For this series, Alprin has built lexicons of shapes that become the bits and fragments from which she assembles environments. These environments represent what she imagines would be seen if a swath of land was cut away to reveal the cross section of a landfill, a reclamation zone, or what it might look like if the world in front of our eyes was dismantled into its constituent parts. Pulled apart into fragments and then remade into new worlds, these landscapes examine the human condition through the fragility of the built environment, and through the lens of 2-dimensional design, in which positive and negative shapes may be interpreted in poetic terms.