Down Where The Fishes Grow
Dvir Gallery, Tel Aviv
2014
Kirkbride’s use of architecture as a therapeutic medium is the departing point for Nelly Agassi’s new series of drawings. Agassi produces her own architectural plans employing the tools (rulers and design templates) and concerns (space and control) of architectural drawings. The Kirkbride asylum was a space that defined time and space for its patients a claustrophobic openness which Agassi seeks to engage and replicate but unlike Kirkbride the artist constructs irrational and impossible spaces. The highly regimented and tightly controlled working method pays homage to the rigor of Kirkbride’s architectural and therapeutic concerns while interrogating the juxtaposition of expansive vistas and mandated confinement, luxury and abjection as they existed in the mental and emotional lives of inmates in these turn of the century hospitals.
Thomas Story Kirkbride (1809-1883) was the quintessential architect of the American asylum boom. After years of serving as the superintendent of the Pennsylvania Hospital for the Insane in Philadelphia and traveling in Europe to visit its European counterparts, Kirkbride published On the Construction, Organization, and General Arrangements of Hospitals for the Insane in 1854. In it, he presented what would come to be known as the Kirkbride Plan – a blueprint for the ideal asylum. The Kirkbride asylum was gargantuan, located in the country, highly segregated by sex, illness, and social class. They were lavishly appointed, beautifully landscaped, architectural gems, and marvels of modern engineering. For Kirkbride, the architecture and atmosphere of the asylum were integral parts of the “moral treatment” available to those who sought or were forced to undergo its treatments.
Read exhibition text here by Nicholas Frank and Abigail Winograd