Down where the little fishes grow: Nelly Agassi

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.