The Portable Window Project
Tory Fair conceived the Portable Window Project in dialogue with a 1968 sculpture of the same name by artist Mary Miss. Designed to mimic the shape of a digital screen, the project revives Miss’ concept of “framing site,” by inviting viewers to roll the sculpture to find their own frame in the surrounding landscape. While our digital culture has made it incredibly easy to frame and take pictures without restraint, Portable Window slows down and makes framing our surroundings a more physical act in sync with our bodies. The project is guided by priorities Miss identifies as: “Breathing space, human scale, and first-hand experience.” Sculpture has the ability to give back and empower these fundamental rights.
The Video Rolls
Sending Portable Window Kits to collaborators across the country and abroad further extends the opportunity to co-create and experiment reframing the familiar. With a built in brace to hold smart phones, these rolls generate an archive of videos and conversations that represent an ongoing portrait of how we continue to adapt to our surroundings in the year of a pandemic and cultural uprising.
The videos are an extension of the sculpture and capture what the sculpture is, in a sense, framing. This slow flipping is the way it feels right now. Observing calm, and even beautiful in moments, but then seamlessly moving to disorienting and dizzy, a rupturing of the frame. Uncertainty. Framing space usually helps to formalize composition, but these videos frame in order to destabilize and disorient. The landscape tilts and turns. What is once familiar is flipped and ruptured. Sculpture has agency to both engage our surroundings and to heal our collective body.
about
Tory Fair realized the first Portable Window at RAIR, Philly in September 2019 after interviewing and exchanging drawings with Mary Miss. She continues to make variations to extend the legacy of Portable Window. For more on RAIR please visit: https://www.rairphilly.org/toryfair And for more on Tory Fair visit: https://toryfair.com/home.html
Questions that inspire the project center around the idea of framing, both physically, metaphorically, and even spiritually. How does the frame instigate conversations in all these areas? How does the sculpture and the frame empower a conversation with our surroundings?
With the ongoing circulation of Portable Window Kit, we hope to gather an archive of images, conversations, and videos to share that help to explore the language and consequences of how we activate the frame. And in turn, how the frame may even help us confront our relationships with the now.
Please be in touch if you would like to participate: contact Tory through her website at https://toryfair.com/contact.html
the people
Tory Fair lives and works in the Boston area where she is an Associate Professor of sculpture at Brandeis University. Recent solo exhibitions and projects include ICA at MECA, Portland Maine, Area Code Art Fair in Boston, RAIR, Philly; Middle of Nowhere, Pine Barrens, NJ; VoCA Talk with Jen Mergel at the Boston Center for the Arts; Drive-By, Watertown; gallery VERY, Boston; Proof Gallery, Boston. Fair also has exhibited work at Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, NY; and the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA. Her work has been reviewed in publications including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and Sculpture Magazine, among others. She has been the recipient of prestigious awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, LEF Foundation, and the Mass Cultural Council.
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In the last few months of adjusting to the pandemic, I’ve focused on work that has developed from an intergenerational dialogue with Mary Miss that I began two years ago. Talking with Miss in her studio inspires me to steward some of the seeds that she planted as a sculptor in the 70s.
Lee Zamir is an MIT graduate where he received his BS and M.Eng. in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science. He worked at Bose Corporation from 1997 through 2019 and held various positions within the company that span engineering, research, sales, and marketing.
Most recently, as the Director of Bose’s New Business Development Lab, Lee worked with entrepreneurs and innovators inside and external to the company to prototype new product concepts and incubate new growth businesses for Bose Corporation.
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Lee is the Entrepreneur-In-Residence at Olin College of Engineering and Founder and Furniture Maker at LZ Design. He is collaborating with Tory Fair on the Portable Window project, designing and fabricating a series of Portable Windows that can be shipped and assembled to other collaborating artists around the world.
