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Catherine Albert is a graduate of the Master of Science Program in Historic Preservation at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Her thesis, Original Wooden Double-Hung Sash On Historic New York City Residential Buildings, draws upon the Window Installation Series and her window sash collections retrieved from nine New York City residential buildings in a series of arguments defending their preservation. The Window Installation Series continues to evolve as a provocative aesthetic platform for engaging public awareness to the preservation issues surrounding the loss of historic wooden double-hung sash windows in historic New York City residential buildings.


The Art of Catherine Albert
By Dan Serig
August 31, 2004

“I started to get that feeling again” was how Catherine Albert referred to the process of working with her window installations. Catherine’s range of art experiences from medical illustrator in Chicago to assistant to a master figurative sculptor in Italy left her desiring that feeling of artists’ flow. This strong desire formed a unique relationship with the window installations that eliminates the distinction between process and product: In the window series, they are one and both.

Eight years ago, the first grouping of windows were found set aside for demolition at a building site. No longer fulfilling their intended use and sitting on the street, Catherine’s attention was drawn to the brass fixtures, the weathered panes, and their odd transitory state of not-yet-completely-discarded. This set in motion a long physical, temporal and conceptual journey. She collected as many of the windows as she could fit into her apartment where they stayed in storage as she worked abroad. And they, in turn, worked on her thinking.

In the Paris Musee National de l'Orangerie there are two oval rooms filled with Monet’s panels of water lilies. Catherine recalled about her visit there: “I started writing my notes about this idea of being surrounded by a creative environment, and I was amazed by the iridescent quality of his painting, this reflected light and images off of water. There’s a transparency and a translucency with the water.”

Catherine’s experience of being surrounded, of being in the artwork prompted her to conceive of installing her windows: “By setting up an environment that envelops the viewer, I am trying to achieve that sometimes in describable realm or situation in which a viewer connects with a work of art. My intent is to allow an open forum of interpretation for the viewer who physically walks throughout the piece with resulting images acting as a documented reference point for individuals who cannot. This concept of the viewer's open interpretation is an element that keeps each installation alive and evolving even after the dismantling.”

Beyond enveloping the viewer, Catherine’s windows evoke a sense of impermanence, transience and history. The windows series takes form in different venues but is never complete. She constantly maps the natural light as it flows through the panes onto the floors and walls creating pools of light. These light traces are dated, logged and identified with the widows. These traces and the photographs she takes create a documentation, a lasting testament to the once-was, to the transient windows, to the impermanent installations.

“I’m trying to make people aware of their own temporal existence. We’re not here forever.” Photographs of previous installations, taken by natural sun and moon light, become small slides mounted in light boxes to be viewed through lupes. The act of taking the lupe, placing it to the slide and peering inside takes the viewer deeper into the experience, into the impermanent, documented past – a past that becomes familiar in the windowed, sunlit, moonlit rooms of the past, the places of times gone by, left to memories and impermanence.

Dan Serig is an assistant professor of art education at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. This interview is part of his dissertation research at Teachers College, Columbia University, in which he investigated the metaphoric practices of artists. Dan is also a painter whose work can be viewed at http://www.danserig.com.