Markus Berger
Markus Berger is Professor in the Department of Interior Architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design. [https://www.risd.edu/people/markus-berger/] He is a registered architect (SBA) in the Netherlands and founder and director of The Repair Atelier. He co-founded and co-edits Int|AR, the Journal on Interventions and Adaptive Reuse, [http://intar-journal.risd.edu/] that encompasses issues of preservation, conservation, alteration and interventions. His work, research, writing and teaching is a critique on modern architecture and focuses on forms of change such as art and design modifications and interventions in the built environment.
THE LEXICON OF REPAIR
Kate Irvin
Kate Irvin is Curator and Head of the Department of Costume and Textiles at the RISD Museum. There she oversees a collection of 30,000 fashion and textile items that range in date from 1500 BCE to the present and represent traditions and innovations across the globe. Her most recent exhibition was Repair and Design Futures (October 5, 2018-June 30, 2019), a year-long multidisciplinary exhibition and programming initiative that investigated mending as material intervention, metaphor, and as a call to action. The exhibition showcased objects of repair from around the globe enhanced by talks, workshops, and academic projects that highlighted innovative contemporary art and design work illuminated and electrified by repair-oriented practices. Other recent exhibitions and projects at the Museum include From the Loom of a Goddess: Reverberations of Guatemalan Maya Weaving (2018); Designing Traditions: Student Explorations in the Asian Textile Collections (2017); All of Everything: Todd Oldham Fashion (2016); and Artist/Rebel/Dandy: Men of Fashion (2013).
REPAIR ATELIER TEAM
Dan Mitrovic
Dan Mitrovic is an artist and designer living in Providence, RI. His work addresses elements of ornament and technique through various mediums, including furniture and metalwork. In their time working in museums and archives they came to a fascination with the ways ornamentation speaks wordlessly to history and to the craft of the hand which made it. Their work plays along these thematic interests of symbols and ornamentation by borrowing the symbolic nature of maps, architectural ornamentation, and folk art.
Graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Furniture Design, his background is in a craft-based education with a consideration of material at its center. This relationship continues to inform their practice, where objects are made through reappropriating techniques located in folk traditions to industrial materials such as aluminum. Applying these methods to objects of furniture and debris, he sees the act of repair as a means of embellishing and ornamenting past use.
Jeff Boomer
I am a conceptual portrait artist whose subject is intellectual property. For nearly ten years, I have examined dozens of patent diagrams daily in my role as a patent examiner. The monotonous, routine work of patent examination easily drains the creative spirit and in an effort to rebel against - and thereby transform - the tedium, I choose to collect the emerging geometric patterns and shapes which are revealed through the every-day ritual of examination. My process is an attempt to translate the purely practical, utilitarian patent figures into the emotional world through the dynamism of color, scale and material, while also capturing the trance-like state the examination process imprints on the mind. My main subjects are inventions largely invisible to the public: the mechatronic control systems and algorithms that power the contemporary world. While invisible, these inventive ideas define and run the modern world much like the invisible hand of physics, biology and chemistry set rules for the natural world. Much like nature, unseen technologies are beautiful, awe inspiring, fear- inducing, revolting and always mysterious. In repurposing patent diagrams, I attempt to reveal the complex emotional dialogue these inventions have between both the human mind and the world at large. My technique involves juxtaposing the stark diagrams of fast-evolving inventions with the traditional, immobile medium of oil paint, the mature craft of glazing and the manual process of oil transfers. Through the old, the new reinvents itself.
K Lou Cornell
K Lou Cornell is an artist and designer in Providence, RI. Since 2018, they have been using the body to display garments that challenge global conformities, specifically those pertaining to gender and identity. Inspired by 80’s and 90’s fashion, drag, and the queer community at large, K Lou’s work is a vehicle of visibility that they use to wear their humanity on their sleeve, literally.
Just like the human body transitions throughout a lifetime, fabrics and materials can be transformed, and take on new identities. The artworks and garments displayed are the early explorations of this ideology, featuring unconventional fabrics like curtains and blankets. Using mostly discarded materials, K Lou’s work also serves as a platform to promote sustainability, restoring value to items that have been deemed worthless. Their goal is to design and create for the local community, while inspiring deeper thought about identity expression, the allocation of value, and excessive waste.
Yelena Kashina
Yelena Kashina