Canada, Chrystie St

The founding partners discovered a space at the back of a building on Chrystie Street that had previously been a sweatshop. They stripped away the plywood floors to discover a dangerously uneven surface of massive stones that were once the floor of an outdoor light well.

The gallerists’ ambivalence towards the conventional structures of a commercial gallery (the gallery as a white box) was one of the main criteria of the design process for this project. With this in mind, the typical operation of a New York gallery was reconsidered; what happens when the operations of an art gallery are exposed to the public, when the space of display bleeds into the space of work, and the display of operations becomes as important as the display of art? The gallery as a gathering space for Canada’s community artists has become an underlying organizational concept for Canada’s subsequent gallery renovations.