DELISI ART FACADE

North Minneapolis -  2009/2010

The DELISI BUILDING ART-FAÇADE is Souliyahn’s second completed medium-scale art installation project. As part of the West Broadway Art-Facade Improvement program, Souliyahn worked with the building owner/developer to conceptualize a façade treatment that would work with their renovation plans for the building located at West Broadway Avenue and Penn Avenues North. The project was awarded a McKnight Foundation Grant through the Northside Arts Collective (NAC) which enabled him to fabricate and install the panels onto the renovated Delisi façade.

Inspiration for the art-façade came from multiple sources. Remnant sheet-material from Tia’s jewelry and ornaments is the prominent component to the panels, which offered a colorful palette that would complement the colorful building. The repeating vertical space between the windows on the façade created a column-like effect with inspired thoughts of totems and the way that groups of people, as well as ideas, can be represented collectively through a single means. The art façade is suggestive of a new sort of totem.

[Souliyahn developed a plan for the triangular plaza in front of the Delisi Building that created an even more dynamic relationship between the columnar art-façade and his abstracted version of three dimensional totems in the proposed plaza – however, his plan for the plaza was not brought to fruition.]  

Thanks to the Feyereisen Studios team for being involved with the installation.