Heather Peterson

Region: Pacific Coast

In the fall of 1996, I found myself in Florence, Italy during the inauguration of the Fashion Biennale—quite by accident. As if by the acumen of a supreme matchmaker, a series of contemporary artists and fashion designers had been coupled with historical sites throughout the city. The signature red dresses of Valentino lined the processional hall of the Academia up to Michelangelo’s David, and Gianfranco Ferre had floated a series of diaphanous vermillion crinolines inside the dark marmoreal dome of San Lorenzo’s Medici Sacristy. These encounters established a founding myth which has afforded me the inheritance of precedent, and permission to intervene with the past; bridges thrown into the historical drift and the impossible adjacencies and simultaneous realities that traffic across them. As an artist committed to architectural aberration, these works occupy a unique territory in the mapped continent of disciplines. They flutter not only in their disciplinary alliances, but also in their representational citizenship, and attempt to oblige the imagination in the liminal conditions of art and architecture and their future potentialities.