Glen Seator turned the features of common built spaces into confounding tests of human consciousness. The notion “I am here” was his central investigation, which he pursued from subjective, physiological, and material vantagepoints. His work grew from numerous and varied attempts to square what can be directly experienced with what is known of the built spaces that contain us. Over two decades his rigorously constructed “failures” gave a material form to the tenuous relationship of the mind to embodied experience—that is, until nearly every work was destroyed, either by his own direction or by misfortune.

Some works were nearly invisible, others monumental. Some were embedded in private spaces with limited accessibility, others occupied public spaces and drew in entire communities of unsuspecting passersby. His full-scale architectural reconstructions of the 1990s changed the way artists thought about architecture as a subject of sculpture and how architects thought about the spaces they designed and built.

Glen Seator: Making Things Moving Places reveals for the first time the entire body of sculptural work produced from 1980 to 2002, including approximately 120 works that are virtually unknown to the public. The volumes are organized into 14 workbooks that reconstruct Seator’s work process, step by step, using the raw materials of the artist’s archive, including his notes, plans, drawings, photographs, and personal statements. Together the volumes form a portable research archive and give a lively and personal view into the process of investigating places and making objects.