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Alex Schweder makes art about architecture: the way we inhabit it, the way it inhabits us, and the sometimes porous border between the two. He refers to his work as "performance architecture" in order to emphasize the bodily nature of his objects and installations. Schweder was trained as an architect; he moved into art to better explore his interest in bodies in space and the space in bodies. In the artist?s own words, his work investigates "the permeability between buildings and the bodies that occupy them. We construct our built world; it thereafter constructs us as occupying subjects."

Two versions of an installation that Schweder has made over the past two years investigate his notion of building-as-body on a grander scale. A Sac of Rooms Three Times a Day was exhibited at Suyama Space in Seattle in 2007. At three times during exhibition hours, an 800-square-foot series of transparent vinyl "rooms" was slowly inflated inside a 500-square-foot "house" made of the identical material. As "house" was smaller than "rooms" when fully inflated, these latter forms struggled to fit into their container as they swelled. Another version of Schweder's "pregnant house," this time entitled A Sac of Room All Day Long (the title indicating the difference in performance time), is currently on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as part of the group exhibition Sensate: Bodies and Design.

Schweder's exhibitions at the Ice Plant and the Locker Plant were designed specifically for those locales, and both invite or allow for the active participation of visitors/viewers. Both exhibitions will be open Thursday evening from 7:00 to 9:00 PM. The Ice Plant will be open again Saturday night from 8:00 to 9:00 PM (and again on consecutive Saturday evenings—October 17, 24, and 31). The Locker Plant will be open this Saturday and Sunday from 10:00 AM to 2:00 PM.

Alex Schweder has a Bachelors degree in Architecture from Pratt Institute (1993) and a Masters in Architecture from Princeton University (1998). He was a Fellow of Architecture at the American Academy of Rome in 2006. Since his switch from architecture to art in the early '00s, he has exhibited work in many galleries and museums in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere. He is the recipient of a 2009 Pollock-Krasner grant.

For more information, please contact:
The Chinati Foundation
1 Cavalry Row
Marfa, TX 79843
t 432 729 4362
www.chinati.org