FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – An exhibition titled “Transfiguration of Mies van der Rohe’s Country House in Brick” will be on display through Sept. 19 in the Fred and Mary Smith Exhibition Gallery in Vol Walker Hall on the University of Arkansas campus.

An opening reception will be held at 5 p.m. Aug. 29.

This exhibition features the work of Paul Mosley, a 2013 Bachelor of Architecture graduate of the Fay Jones School of Architecture. He is pursuing a Master of Science in Architecture (MSArch) at the University of Illinois-Chicago School of Architecture.

Mosley said this project came about as an attempt to understand the critical role of history, representation and form in architecture.

“I was looking for a historical project in architecture that could be resilient enough to withstand a process of transfiguration, which literally means a change in figure,” Mosley said. “Mies van der Rohe’s unbuilt Country House in Brick (circa 1923) seemed like an eligible candidate because of its ecstatic quality (which is a result of planar and spatial overlap), and was first suggested to me by David Buege. Transfiguration involves the temporal dimension of figurality. It is related to Peter Eisenman’s idea of transformation, although it is more akin to decomposition (in that it is mostly a subtractive process, rather than additive).”

The work presented in the exhibition is also concerned with representation. Mosley was looking at artists such as John Singer Sargent and Giorgio Morandi and the way that they compose bodies (Sargent) and bottles (Morandi) in space. So, he made collages of their paintings inside of the architectural renderings to aid the viewer’s reading of the spatial and compositional characteristics of the architecture. This attitude towards representation is primarily understood through image and space.

“I want to show current students at the school that they don’t have to restrict their education to studio, or an office,” he said. “This project, the work presented in the exhibition, to paraphrase Michel Houellebecq, reassures me of the existence of this work, and even of my own existence, ‘for in a social species individuality is little more than a short piece of fiction.’”

The public is invited to attend this exhibition, presented by the Fay Jones School of Architecture. Gallery hours are 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. Admission is free.

For more information, contact 479-575-4704 or architecture.uark.edu.