Raymundo Sesma Honor Award from The American Institute of Architects

Artist Raymundo Sesna received the Honor Award, the most prestigious prize granted by The American Institute of Architects, for his site-specific intervention entitled Campo Expandido VIII (Expanded Field VIII) carried out in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the end of July of this year. Campo Expandido VIII was created on three separate constructions built by the architectural firm Calott+Gifford Architecture/Urban Design, sponsors of the artist¿s project. The three small structures were raised on the historic center designed by John Gaw Meem in 1950, where the Southern Union Gas Company was once located; this area was declared part of the National Heritage of the United States. Sesma believes that in his work, he searches for a dialogue between the landscape and the expanded field of painting. A discipline no longer limited by the bidimensionality of the canvas, but that is now supported by the architectural surface. Free from the constraints imposed by the canvas, the surface acquires the tridimensional values of an actual expanded field. This is the manner in which Sesma¿s work not only attains the physical and intellectual end result of something already there, but it also becomes a way of communicating, of articulating by means of different media, the several layers of interaction among the landscape, the architecture, the community, the history, the traditions, the future, and the spectator.