The World of Christian Lischewski by Elizabeth Michelman (For Artscope Magazine March/April 2012)

Hans-Christian Lischewski Untitled: A Retrospective March 27-April 28, 2012 Public Reception April 5 from 6:00-8:00 PM, Artists Talk at 6:30 PM At The Gallery At Mount Ida College 777 Dedham St. Newton, MA 02459. Tel: 617.928.4500 While the mainstream of art is shaped by accord of dealers, curators, and publicists, its byways are enriched by seers and geniuses who open our eyes to surprise, pleasure, and insight. The 40-year-plus retrospective of Hans-Christian Lischewski at Mount Ida College presents a diverse body of work reflecting his unsung roles as educator, creator of visionary architecture, and self-styled architist. Lischewskis architecturally-informed photography has forayed into photo-silkscreen, digital photo-montage, and a wide range of represented and simulated landscape and interiors created with state-of-the-art imaging technologies. Behind these sophisticated images stands an honored teacher of architecture, interior design, and computer imaging processes who has influenced countless designers through his artistic eye, photographic precision, and mastery at integrating technological innovations into practice. The gifted architect and urban planner obtained degrees from the University of Karlsruhe, Germany, taught briefly at Stuttgart, and in 1976 came to MIT to pursue his Master of Architecture in Advanced Studies. In Cambridge he encountered a seismic shift in the technologies and conceptualizing of architectural visualization. Laborious techniques of drawing, model-making, and analog photography were giving way to powerful computers and programs, new imaging tools, and unprecedented ways of combining them. Alongside researchers at MITs Media Lab, Lischewski developed many innovative modeling and simulation methods, demonstrated in Earnest Burdens 1985 classic Design Simulation. He secured a grant to join Nicholas Negropontes Aspen Project, whose team drove a four-way continuous stop-action camera

down every street of Aspen, Colorado, systematically diagramming and filming the one-mile square downtown in ten-foot intervals. They reconstituted the 52,000 resulting images and scenic detours in a ground-breaking interactive investigation of the citys visual structure, a precursor to Google maps and routebuilding programs in use today. After sixteen years at Pratt Institutes School of Architecture (as Director of Architectural Computing and Interim Chair) and ten years teaching Interior Design at Mount Ida, Lischewski draws no sharp line between technical wizardry and art. Deeply committed to his profession, he experiences art as an underlying dynamic. Its all about process, he says, calling his time-intensive works play. Though claiming not to be a perfectionist, hell devote sixty hours to fine-tuning a birthday composite of fifty flower-images for his wife. Engaged for years in the practice of architecture (including eleven as Chief Information Officer at Perkins and Will), Lischewskis career has offered countless opportunities to experiment with cutting-edge technologies. And his compulsion to try out anything and push tools to their limits dovetails with being a natural teacher. Lischewski made even his army years count by discovering and teaching the use of expert camera equipment. Atop the staircase at Pratts architecture school he commandeered a revolving gallery of his own experiments to juice up students uses of new technical applications. He was voted the Distinguished Educator award by the New York Society of Architects in 1999, and in 2007 received Mount Idas Lettieri award for teaching excellence. Stirred by poet Richard Nelsons admonition to climb the same mountain a hundred times, Lischewski continually investigates new approaches to old problems. He explores many means of photographing and projecting 360degree city environments, including circular fish-eye views of the world looming inward and anamorphic rings of urban surroundings that can be re- projected realistically on a curved martini-glass-like surface. He obtained virtuosic panoramic images of New Yorks Times Square and Flatiron District by setting up a revolving camera in the middle of the street at 4AM on a June morning. By closing the open shutter whenever cars waited at the red light, Lischewski created scenes that are preternaturally detailed, daylit, yet void of human presence. He has also created panoramic views in a single plane by other methods. To portray Bostons Charles River and Back Bay skyline, he excises a strip from a continuous composite of numerous highly-detailed, successive images photographed from a single point of view. Elsewhere he makes cubistic photocollages of overlapping images, angles and details (a technique he claims anticipated David Hockney).

A portrait series begun in New York explores a fascination with individuality and female beauty. Multiple superimposed faces of Lischewskis Pratt students (and several studies of Marilyn Monroe) offer transparent constellations of transient expressions. The faces drift in a fog, unfathomable objects of desire. More obscure are his content-laden digital collages, seamless and surrealistic. In Monument Valley 1, a mannequins head gazes out like a medieval portrait from a desert of breast-like landforms, surrounded by veiled figures and lingering gleams of sunset, while the twinned John Hancock Tower mirrors itself in the distance. These and other dream-like preoccupations, invoking masculine and feminine polarities, dislocated cultural identity, and the anxiety of uncharted spaces, resist rational translation. In other shifts of scales and contexts, Lischewski enjoys expanding space by fooling the eye. He adapts architectures stereoscopical techniques to still life, magnifying green and red peppers in unworldly detail. And in a mirror at knee level, he floats giant scanned images of high-chroma pansies, while the originals hover overhead in an undulating formation of ceiling panels. As if bookending the exhibition, two video screens reveal different dimensions of envisioning past and future. One offers a slideshow of 400 photographic images culled from Lischewskis vast archive. The other screen shows colorfully pulsating animations and rotating virtual constructions designed in ongoing collaboration with his high school friend Rudolf Legde, an independent computer artist and educator in Germany. Forging beyond the known, anticipating the notyet-in-being, the visionary stays in motion, riding the wave.