‘Classroom Ecologies’ is a new series of architectural models and installations that will follow on from Hogan’s previous work ‘Reverse Archaeologies’, Tin Sheds (2024) & ‘Realm of the Half-Forgotten’, Aoyama Meguro Gallery (2022). It is a project focused on the development and creation of ‘Extensive Architectural Models’ - based on a history of ‘all the Educational Art Faculties I have attended’ including making architectural models of the old and new SCA facilities and its art Spaces. On the surface, the ‘architectural models’ in my proposal evoke my memory of the spaces in which I have lived and worked throughout my practice. ‘Classroom Ecologies’ (1986 - 2026), signals a natural extension of this long tradition of mutual spatial influence between art and architecture. Many of the models will be displayed as large architectural table sculptures. To accompany the models – documentation of past works and real sculptural objects -  will enhance the reflective reality of spatial memories, embodied histories, and the ‘Logic of place’. 

As artwork they seem to comment on the realm of architecture, even taking on the shape of architectural projects, produced and presented in the form of meticulously drawn and measured models. They might even be seen as dealing directly with architectural issues, seemingly concerned, for example, with the nature of housing or of educational institutions. This is, of course, hardly a new phenomenon in the contemporary artworld; Minimalism, Installation art, performance art, Land art, have all engaged spatial concerns both metaphorically and literally. My proposed work might then be construed as a simple continuation and elaboration of these preoccupations, especially – as for myself, from early 2000’s after painting – I began to look closely at activities of performance art, and began to build installations within elaborated spatial settings, as if stages, platforms, or structures for a conceptual ‘act’. 

But the peculiar quality that marks these new works as different, both in characteristic and in kind from earlier ‘sculptural’ projects is that, in a self-conscious way, they claim, and take on the status of, architecture. Which is not to say that they have fully realized themselves as works of architecture; indeed, they stop short precisely at the moment when we would want to recognize them as ‘real’ projects and, precisely in that momentary ambiguity between the possible and the impossible, retain their critical status and their place in art. 

Where these models are fully architectural is in the question they raise, and the special ‘field’ from which those questions have been derived, posing specifically architectural questions about the nature of domestic and institutional space and its role in the formation of a human subject. More particularly, however, what distinguishes this project from its apparent antecedents in the 1970s and 1980s, e.g. works of Dan Graham, Nauman, Acconnci. Et.al. is its insistent and almost obsessive interest in memory, and at the same time, the interrogation of space as a primary vehicle for tracing its repression and recovery. Beginning with an interest in contemporary theories of ‘Collective memory repression / or collective amnesia in art’ – I am attempting to recover the memory of buildings in which I had been educated and to map these memories of art making on their existing plans in order to produce complex models. With a ‘loss of memory’ – and thereby of space – of up to (an estimate) eighty percent of the structures, these lost spaces (unknown to others) which will be modeled as solid blocks (blocked memory), while divergences between remembered patterns of use and actual forms were forced in favour of the memory, resulting in complex three-dimensional projects that seem almost utopian in their impossibility. That is the impossibility of reconstructing ‘all’ of the architectural topography and educational events which occurred in my experience of those spaces. Of course, the presented workshop lectures and in-studio construction works form out of a fragmentation of these spatial memories. 

These models and the artworks which will be therefore generated in relation to their institutional counterpart – emerge as a memory map of the ‘geography’ of (other and my own) art education, or as I have previously put it – ‘notations of the failure of memory, the un-retrievability of past occupations in space: ‘Buildings that I had occupied almost everyday for years that could barely be recalled without photographic imagery. The teachers, courses and activities held within them are a vast undifferentiated mind swamp’. In traditional memory theatres, from Quintilian’s house of rhetoric to the Renaissance paradigms of Giordano Bruno, architecture of the studio, classrooms, art institutions, or educational complexes act as a frame for the object or name, and space acts as a positioning device for locating the desired recollection; architectural space is a precondition, an invented and remembered fiction for something else, for something potentially forgotten. 

To accompany these amnesiac models – many past works can be recalled, both in presented documentations within the studio installation context or as real sculpturally re-installed objects; which further bring a reflective realness to the memories and history of the artist's practice. On the continual influence and memory of spaces which directly contributed to the development of my art education, pedagogy, notions of criticality, technical training, evolving interpretations of art practice and its research will be presented.