Corporate Headquarters
Utility
We provided guidance in establishing a clear vision and set of objectives for the artwork program in the client’s new corporate headquarters. By blending natural and industrial materials, each piece echoes the client’s commitment to innovation and sustainability. The integration of these artworks has transformed the space, making it more human, inspiring, and reflective of the company’s focus on sustainability.
Architect: Gensler. Photography: Reuben Bloom and Ben Premeaux.
DRIFT, Fragile Future FFC 3.1, 2011, dandelion seed, phosphorus bronze, LED. Acquired through Carpenters Workshop Gallery.
Suspended Lighting Installation
Elevator Lobby
This light sculpture fuses nature and technology. It contains real, hand-picked dandelions that individually connect to LED lights and rest on phosphorous bronze frames. This labor-intensive process is a statement against mass production and throwaway culture.
DRIFT re-connects humanity with nature through technology. Dutch artists Lonneke Gordijn (1980) and Ralph Nauta (1978) founded DRIFT in 2007. With a full multidisciplinary team, they work on experiential sculptures, installations and performances. DRIFT manifests the phenomena and hidden properties of nature with the use of technology in order to learn from the Earth’s underlying mechanisms and to re-establish our connection to it.
Dimensional Wall nstallations
Conferencing Floor Corridors
As part of the project, four regional artists were commissioned several large, site specific artworks designed to activate long corridors. These works were chosen for their unique ability to serve as connectors, collectively forming a grid that embodies that dynamic and energizing essence of the energy industry.
In Ben Butler’s Nexus, clusters of hand-carved wooden forms evokes a vast organic network inspired by the notion of myriad individual parts connected in a complex yet cohesive system, both in clusters and across distances. The composition is meant to evoke the energy that this connectivity brings to a collective whole – a company, a power grid, a community.
Ben Butler creates sculptures that reflect the sensibility that objects are not fixed and finite but are the product or residue of ongoing processes. Throughout the natural world, unexpected complexity emerges from simple, persistent processes. When the order of things is not readily apparent, complexity is often mistaken for chaos. In the rush to comprehend we often miss the wonderful unseen forces at work. The artist’s response is to play in these boundaries between the simple and the complex, and between the complex and the overwhelming.
BEN BUTLER, Nexus, 2023, Poplar wood. Site-specific commission.
Solar Plains’ imagines expansive solar fields blanketing the rolling hills and soft valleys so commonly associated with the landscape of our natural state, echoing a commitment to renewable energy so desperately needed in today’s evolving world. Through industrial metalworking processes, flat sheets of stainless steel are formed and bent along numerous vertical lines into undulating horizontal strips, then fabricated and welded together to create a complex network of stainless steel facets. Each individual facet reflects light in its own unique way.
Thomas Campbell practice evolved from the depths of the industrial steel world following a seven-year stint as a steelworker for his family’s 136 year-old steel fabrication business. Steeped in this lineage, his work seeks to advance the familial tradition beyond the constraints of the industrial world, shifting our perceptions of a material often viewed as cold, rigid, dark, and unyielding in its modern industrial application.
THOMAS CAMPBELL, Solar Plains, 2023, stainless steel, blackened steel. Site-specific commission.
Comprised of cast porcelain and mirrors, this work is inspired by the complex interconnection of urban life. To create Connected, Thomas Schmidt folded a large printed map of Charlotte’s electrical grid along the city’s busiest streets. The resulting folded surface was then 3D scanned, 3D printed and ultimately cast in porcelain. This abstract map in combination with the reflective mirrors serve as a poetic embodiment of the way in which we as individuals and a collective community are connected through our shared resources.
In a time when experience is increasingly influenced by technology, Thomas Schmidt’s work attempts to both integrate and blur the boundaries between high tech and traditional craft methods as means for exploring the tactile world. Schmidt draws upon installation art and architecture to orchestrate and capture a variety of material moments for the viewer to experience and unfold.
THOMAS SCHMIDT, Connected, 2023, cast porcelain, integrated mirrors. Site-specific commission.
Each site that we design for has an embedded history and each client has an aspirational mission. As such, much of our initial ideation comes from creating an abstract representation of those narratives.”
Thomas Schmidt, Artist
Composed from several hundred individually cast hydrocal plaster segments, Clear Sky resembles a cluster of hovering cloud-like forms spanning the three walls. The piece presents a whimsical contradiction – parts that are built systematically from a dense and textural material accumulate into forms that are amorphous and appear buoyant and even ephemeral. Consistent with the theme of a future of cleaner energy, the installation plainly evokes a feeling of fresh air, with a nod to the simple joy of cloud gazing.
Woven Wall Hangings
Conference Room
Gregory’s work uses cloth construction as a fundamental center, a place to start from and move back to. With a background in weaving, she sees herself as a builder; drawing clear connections between the lines of thread laid perpendicularly through a warp and the construction of architectural spaces.
Formally, Gregory’s work takes shape through a pallet of building materials either paired with or mimicking textiles. She finds a tension between materials like concrete and the structural patterns of cloth. By pairing these seemingly opposite worlds together she inverts material stereotypes, using the ‘delicate’ material to exhibit strength or exposing the ‘structural’ materials’ instabilities. These gestures allow for a reinterpretation of material identities leaving the viewer to confront their understanding of these everyday utilities.
CRYSTAL GREGORY, Below the Surface, 2023, handwoven textile cast in concrete. Site-specific commission in collaboration with Momentum Gallery.
Additional Projects
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