by Bailey White
Staff Writer
Wednesday’s downtown ArtWalk will have its usual round of venues and destinations with a slight twist at one stop.
Six After Five, a group of local artists and architects, will set up space at 11 E. Forsyth to show off their plans for Gallery Thirteen, an imaginary building that would fill space between the apartment building and the Haydon Burns Library.
Currently an alley, Gallery Thirteen would be a four-story building featuring exhibition space, artists’ studios and a rooftop terrace. The group will display their blueprints, renderings and models during ArtWalk.
The point wasn’t actually to get the building built, but to show what could be done to create a public awareness of the architecture around them and to get people thinking about the process of de- signing and constructing a building.
“We wanted to generate an experience that can only be achieved by thoughtful architecture,” said Duy Ho, who, along with Chris Belyea, Jose Cardenas, Mike Kleinschmidt, Logan Rink and Shuan Thurston, is a member of Six After Five (the group named themselves for the weekly after work meetings they scheduled to collaborate and plan).
“People in Jacksonville are not exposed to architecture and the process of architecture,” said Rink. “We realized a need for more cultural activities here and we knew at ArtWalk our audience would be artists and art patrons.”
“One of our major goals is to show the process and the evolution of an idea,” said Belyea. “When you see the process, the final piece becomes more meaningful.”
The people who inhabit the space make it more meaningful, too, which is why artist Shaun Thurston has created paintings that represent his interpretation of the designs and ideas coming from the rest of the group and of the way the space could be used. They’ll also be part of the
ArtWalk display.
While the group didn’t work within the confines of a budget, they did pay attention to the space and its current use.
“We incorporated the library into our design,” said Ho. “We wanted to establish a relationship with the existing space to acknowledge the past.”
There are 25 ArtWalk stops this month, including original stops at 100 N. Laura Street and Gallery L in Independent Square and new stops at La Cena and The Nature Conservancy.