Aram Moshayedi currently lives in Los Angeles where he is a second year Ph.D. student in the department of Art History at the University of Southern Calfornia.
Dan Bayles’ works and projects surrounding the architectural and social realities of Stinson Middle School in San Antonio, Texas comprise the individual parts of a case study committed to aestheticization and intervention. Imagined as an institution of the state, Stinson Middle School here operates for Bayles as an icon of discipline, maturation, and contested governmental policymaking—namely the No Child Left Behind Act (2001) and subsequent pushes for nationwide standardized testing. His interest in this specific school as an apparatus departs from an attempt to illustrate current anxieties surrounding these issues in the popular imagination and instead centers on the architectural framework upon which this social terrain is mapped.
This is best executed in Bayles’ series of paintings and drawings that appropriate and alter the present architectural and aerial maps that currently define Stinson Middle School’s physical space. Stinson Defined (2006) and The First One Wasn’t Working – Proposal for the Replacement of the Original Architectural Structure of Stinson Middle School, San Antonio, TX (2006) are compelling in that the view offered is that from above, an allusion to the school’s namesake Katherine Stinson, the fourth female pilot licensed in the United States and a member of the family behind the Stinson Aircraft Corporation, a company that supplied planes to the US military throughout World War II.
The degree to which his studio practice is conceptually committed to the social is significant: Bayles’ Portable Classroom, a mobile billboard and intervention, was initially presented to the school’s administration as a viable option for overcrowded classrooms while creating a venue for student-initiated public projects. Though the social aspect of the work resulted in a series of photographs of the proposed classroom at different sites on the school’s campus, Portable Classroom remains a document to both failure and idealism.
