Living Surfaces

Living Surfaces is a kinetic sculptural installation that treats the gallery wall as a responsive architectural skin. The work begins from the material continuity between painting and architecture: both wall and canvas are built through layers of primer, gesso, and paint. From this shared surface logic, I imagine the canvas not as something placed on the wall, but as a form that emerges from it. Using sewn canvas structures, I construct hollow rectilinear volumes that protrude outward from the wall. Coated with multiple layers of gesso and paint, these forms visually and materially echo the wall itself, appearing as if the architectural surface has swollen or pushed forward from within. The wall shifts from passive support to a living membrane under pressure. Embedded exciters and bass shakers animate the sculptures through vibration. Contact piezo microphones attached to the wall capture subtle structural and environmental vibrations, which are amplified and routed back into the canvas bodies. Rather than functioning as conventional speakers, the sculptures act as resonant forms that translate architectural vibration into tactile movement across their surfaces. As viewers move around the work, the vibrations register differently across the body. Proximity and position continuously alter how the surface is perceived, producing shifting zones of resonance that are felt as much as seen. The installation invites an embodied awareness of space, where architecture is encountered not as static enclosure but as a sensing, vibrating body. Through this feedback system, Living Surfaces reimagines the gallery wall as a site of emergence, resonance, and spatial responsiveness.