Aaron Forrest and Yasmin Vobis met in architecture graduate school at Princeton University and established their love of architecture through informal projects together. After years of moving to various cities and pursuing different projects, Ultramoderne was born.

Ultramoderne is an award-winning architecture and design firm located in Providence, RI, run by Forrest and Vobis. According to their website, “The principals are driven by an experimental approach that leads to conceptually rigorous and well-executed designs. The office has experience working at a wide variety of scales, from single-family residences to urban-scale planning.” What makes Ultramoderne so unique, according to Forrest, is their focus and dedication to public space projects. They’re driven and passionate about figuring out different ways to engage with a broader public.

“Providence has been amazing,” Forrest says. The space they occupy within Rhode Island is certainly significant to them. They lived and worked in New York before moving to Providence, and both experiences were incredibly different. Forrest and Vobis truly seem to love the region in which they work now.

SOUTHLIGHT Performance Pavilion + Public Garden 2016, project in collaboration with RISD students and faculty | Photo by Jo Sittenfeld

“The thing I love about Providence are the many old industrial buildings that exist around the city.” explains Vobis. “Many of these are incredible spaces — large, open spaces with lots of natural light and a clear expression of structure. The challenge we face will be to understand how to reuse many of these buildings in the future — how we breathe new life into them and re-imagine them — instead of tearing them down and replacing them with cheaper, faster and less flexible buildings, which happens all too often.”

But Ultramoderne is just getting started. While they’ve had lots of business thus far, with past clients including the Van Alen Institute, National Parks Service, Chicago Parks District, and the Boston Society of Architects, they are ready for the next challenge. “I would like to see Ultramoderne tackle larger public projects,” explains Vobis. “Our office started with small-scale installations, which were a great opportunity for us to test new ideas and techniques… we relish the idea that architecture can be for everyone, not just those that can afford to have something commissioned.”

Forrest adds, “We’d love to be so lucky to continue what we’re doing and find out how architecture can do more to help the community at large.”

Weir Farm wayfinding project with Jessica Forrest, Noah Klersfeld, Suzanne Mathew, and Dungjai Pungauthaikan 2015

Yasmin Vobis received her Bachelor’s Degree from the University of California, Berkeley and her Master’s Degree from Princeton University, where she was awarded the Butler Traveling Fellowship and the Suzanne Kolarik Underwood Thesis Prize. She has taught at Princeton University and currently teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Aaron Forrest (AIA, NCARB) is a licensed architect who teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design. He received both his Bachelor’s Degree and Masters in Architecture from Princeton University. He has extensive professional experience, having practiced in New York with Bernheimer Architecture and Guy Nordenson and Associates Structural Engineers, and in Madrid with Ábalos & Herreros Arquitectos.

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Tempest, Light, The Gentleman Farmer – these are just a few of New-Milford-based abstract photographer Rick Giles’ exhibitions. His style is atmospheric and textural, creating a visceral reaction upon looking at this work. Giles’ images include people, landscapes, or objects, but it is how he captures light, in its pure form, that delights. It relies upon a melding of humans and nature to create an effect. In his own words, Giles states that “It is this very pull of nature that has proved the influencing factor in Giles’ own move from the city to the countryside. A change that provoked an adjustment in approach to the subject matter and allowed more of a personal exploration of the environment in which he lives.”

In his show entitled 23.5°, which is Earth’s axial tilt as it orbits the sun, he reveals what he intended to capture, “This photographic series was shot across one year, on 7 acres of land, and sets out to interpret the seasons through the changing hues within the landscape.” The abstract images, seen in series, remove the usual indicators of time and place; here we rely on the colors and feelings the images evoke to determine when we are in each season. Time moves quickly here.

Image from 23.5° | Courtesy of Rick Giles

Giles has also documented his relationship with the farmland that he inhabits in New Milford, in his series called Unearthed. This exhibition “encapsulates the relationship between man and nature. It documents [his] engagement to the place [he] has chosen to live and [his] progressive domestication of the land.” Giles explains since moving here, he has been excavating and digging out objects ranging from “obvious” such as farming implements, to “absurd,” like gigantic toy dinosaurs. The objects belonged to the generations of families who lived on the land before Giles. Found items are photographed behind dingy glass on a black colored background and give the impression that he’s somehow photographed them in situ.

Image from Unearthed | Courtesy of Rick Giles

Rick Giles was born in England in 1969 and now lives and works in New Milford, CT. He represented by Eleven Gallery, London, and his works are also available at The Cat Street Gallery in Hong Kong and has been shown in museums such as London’s National Portrait Gallery and Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris.

Top image from 23.5° | Courtesy of Rick Giles

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Art that takes you in and out of linear time. Music, photography, film, and video that create “incandescent, synesthetic quality” content. This is what viewers can expect from What Time This Feels, a multimedia installation in Providence, RI. Suara Welitoff, a Cambridge-based artist who works with found footage, original pieces, and filters to create photographs and videos, curated the show in collaboration with independent curator Micah Salkind, and 186 Carpenter curator and gallerist, Jori Ketten.

Take had the chance to chat with Salkind, one of the collaborators of What Time This Feels, to learn more about his and Welitoff’s work. Salkind is a curator and scholar working and living in Providence, RI:

Tell me about where What Time This Feels started:

It makes the most sense to start with saying that Suara is my aunt – she’s my mother’s sister. I’ve been exposed to her work since I was a young kid and she was making still photographs and playing experimental music, and when I moved out to New England, we became much closer. I would take the train up to Cambridge and we’d hang out. I’ve just been fascinated by her process as a visual artist and the way she treats the objects on which she works and the way that she relates to the media she’s interpreting and messing with.

I don’t know when we started having this serious conversation about what it would be like to put a show together, but I said to Suara that I had a relationship with Jori Ketten who is the curator (and gallerist) at 186 Carpenter – 186 is a really amazing low-profit, kind of community space, that Jori runs and curates. Jori was like, ‘yeah your aunt’s work is really right up my alley, I’d really love to see what you guys put together.’ Suara has never shown in Rhode Island – and she hasn’t really done this kind of show at a space like 186 Carpenter. So it was a really exciting opportunity for me to say, okay – let’s look at all the stuff that you’re currently in process with, and we’ll pull things together that tell a coherent story.

One of the things that I told her that I was always interested in was the way that she deals with time in her practice. Suara will work on something for months, leave it for years, and then come back to it suddenly out of nowhere and it’ll make total sense. So yeah! We’ve put together a show of about 10 different pieces. There’ll be several video pieces and several still images, some of which are pulled from video work and some of which are their own objects.

What’s been one of the best parts about working on the show together?

I think it’s deepened my understanding of where Suara is coming from as a maker. It’s been really fabulous to find this deeper connection through not only her work, but through this sense of empathy that she brings through her practice as an artist, which is something that really resonates with me as a curator.

What are your future projects? What can we expect to see from either of you?

I hope to continue working with Suara as she develops her practice as an installation artist, but I am also working on an academic monograph on Chicago house music. Suara continues to hone her process in collaboration with her Boston gallerists at Barbara Krakow and other non-profit galleries in Berlin and New York.

Suara Welitoff | Photo courtesy of Micah Salkind

What Time This Feels is a multi-media installation by Suara Welitoff. The exhibition opens October 30th through December 10th, with an opening reception on November 5th at 5:00pm.
186 Carpenter Street, Providence RI. 

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