About the Artist
Car and Maya’s life trajectories sometimes intersect in Toronto’s West end. Their design explorations overlap on the topics of exploding boundaries, agency, the mind and technology.
Car Martin is a licensed architect, designer & educator who has recently launched Cyan Station, a studio that uses customization and experimentation to increase access to beautiful and affordable spaces. Car is a professor at the George Brown School of Design in interactive media and design. They are a scavenger and DIY maker, drawing on backgrounds in visual art, fashion & photography.
Maya Orzechowska is an Intern Architect whose drawings and meditations investigate the way architecture influences the self and the cultural binarization of the public (external) and private (internal) realms in relation to health, emotions, empathy and the environment. Maya’s work is inspired by ten years of experience in research and design in Montreal, Toronto, New York, London and Hong Kong.
About the Works
Twinplex depicts a series of tropes that challenge our notion of selfhood. The haunted twins of cinematic space, the reproducibility of ordinary housing and ready-to-wear fashions. These mutations of capitalism are byproducts of a system that feeds on individuality yet they are emblematic of our codependency and insignificance. Twinplex invites the viewer into an experience that conveys the pleasure of being a body in space, while simultaneously depicting the fear of not knowing where the body ends and the space begins. Within Twinplex, an idea of ‘home’ is suggested, one that is fragmentary and increasingly traversing digital and physical realms.
Twinplex is an interactive collage with triggered sound clips. The piece mines the intersections and divergences of two designers’ research on architecture and selfhood. The project grows out of discussions on lewdness, porosity and dirtiness: concepts ignored in architectural representation. The collaborative process, like dialogue, weaves the creators’ work in response to moves of the other. This playful familiarization in the generative process repeats in the relationship with the audience; in Twinplex, the spectator has agency, constructing their own path within the spatial network.
Diverse and disparate, Twinplex shares fragments of ideas on the struggles of finding self and home. The home moves away from a whole, centered self and towards the fragmented, distributed, self. Linked yet lost. Everywhere present and nowhere whole; everywhere made of others and carried in pieces by everyone whose path has been crossed.
