11.14.23 Visiting Lecture | Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers, Dream the Combine: Afterimages

Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers are conceptual artists and architects working across scales in installation, architecture, sculpture, film, drawing, movement, and social practice. In 2013, they co-founded Dream The Combine in Minneapolis, MN. The duo move between the Midwest and Ithaca, NY, where they are faculty at Cornell University. Jennifer and Tom have produced numerous site-specific works that explore metaphor, perceptual uncertainties, and the boundary between real and illusory space. They consider these as frameworks for vision and movement that complicate the relationship between body, space, image, and environment. The scale of their work and the industrial materials they use (steel, glass, construction textiles) link their work to infrastructures that order our reality. They question the rigidity of visual, spatial, and social systems by making structures meant to bring people together through visceral experience. Their work serves as a critique of what we take for granted and often reveals histories latent in place.
Dream The Combine were named a 2023 Emerging Voice by The Architectural League, 2022-2023 Rome Prize Fellows in Architecture by the American Academy in Rome, 2022 Fellows in Architecture and Design by United States Artists, 2021 Visual Artist Fellows by the McKnight Foundation, 2020-2021 J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller Prize winners by Landmark Columbus, 2018 MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program winners by The Museum of Modern Art, 2018 Architecture Residents at Art Omi, and 2017 Jerome Foundation/Franconia Sculpture Park Artists-in-Residence. Their work has been exhibited at the 2023 Venice Biennale Architettura curated by Lesley Lokko, The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, MadArt Studio, and sites in Rome, Vancouver BC, Minneapolis MN, St. Paul MN, and Columbus IN. Their writing and interviews have appeared in Wallpaper, Metropolis, MasContext, Log, Architectural Design, the Journal of Architectural Education, and Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America.