To celebrate the release of Occupation, our first book project, Allied Works was invited to transform and take over a foyer and gallery space at the Ace Hotel in New York City, which served as the venue for the official launch party. The foyer links the Ace lobby on 29th Street with two Broadway facing retail and restaurant spaces, and has hosted a range of installations and creative works since the hotel’s completion.
“Forest for the Trees” plays with perception, dislocation and distortion through one simple move: a continuous and carefully installed image, spanning walls, ceiling, moldings and floors as well as table and door surfaces, to create—from a certain approach—a sense of total immersion in a forest of monumental Douglas-fir. For an instant, the sense of urban compression, the in-between-ness of stacked floors, drops away. From other vantage points, the image appears as a warped space or pure abstraction, inviting the viewer to wander and seek the point of resolution.