Mary Lum

The Architecture of Language

Artist Mary Lum will deliver a lecture as part of the Advanced Studio V: Practicing Uncertainty series organized by the Architecture program at Columbia GSAPP.

Mary Lum creates intricate collages, installations, and photographs that use the urban environment to explore geometric abstraction, perspectival space, and color field. She is interested in the margins of city life - overlooked details that she photographs in isolation and recombines within her work. Stairwells, signage, and storefronts are fragmented and dislocated from their original context, only to be repositioned within Lum’s layered arrangements of color. Through juxtaposing disparate elements within her work, the artist aims to construct new meanings from the familiar and mundane.