GLASS MEMORY Linda Kasian · iPhotographyHomes

Where Axis builds new architecture with a mirror, Glass Memory listens to what the city's existing glass is already doing on its own.

Glass Memory is a series of single-frame photographs of Los Angeles — downtown and Century City — where the facades of one building reflect and distort the buildings around them. No mirror is added. The work is the result of paying attention to the way a flat curtain wall, photographed at a slight angle, holds the warped, melted, half-erased outline of another building inside it.

The images sit in a strange register: they are documentary photographs of real architecture, but the architecture they show only exists for a moment, in the reflection. A grid of windows becomes a ripple. A solid facade behaves like memory — partial, dilated, prone to drift. I think of Glass Memory as a companion to Axis. Axis uses a mirror to invent new spaces. Glass Memory finds the buildings already inventing themselves.

Both series share a question: what is architecture when it stops trusting its own outline?