Excavating Architecture

Working together since 1997 as Lead Pencil Studio, the collaborative Seattle-based duo of Annie Han and Daniel Mihalyo has created installations and interventions that blur the line between art and architecture.

Formally trained and working as practicing architects, the two utilize the principles of architecture to investigate varying perceptions of spatial concerns. Han and Mihalyo make the invisible visible through an emphasis on negative space within rural and urban built environments. By focusing on what is not there or presenting something that is somewhat incomplete, Han and Mihalyo offer a narrative that each viewer completes. Through alternate views of the subject the artists address how our bodies interact with space to draw out an emotional reaction to space and illuminate how we perceive our surroundings.

With architectural degrees from the University of Oregon—where they met—and a background in the traditional art media of ceramics, photography, sculpture and drawing, Han and Mihalyo pull from both their architectural and fine arts practices. For them it is about overlapping dissimilar methods to create a new discipline by using the language of architecture in combination with the looser, and less rigid, process of visual art to shape sculptural installations and fine drawings. The resulting works of art inform a new way of seeing the spaces we occupy.