Real, Fake Mix In Katarina Burin’s Homage To Early Female Designer

Walking through two nondescript black doors near the 24th Street BART Station into the light-filled exhibit of Katarina Burin’s work at Ratio 3 gallery is like teleporting from a busy urban sidewalk into the middle of an architectural model. The gallery could be a replication of a designer’s drawings, or perhaps a furniture showroom, or a home staged for sale in the 1950s. The viewer becomes part of the exhibit, which spans several rooms and includes faux walls, life-size sketches of generic people an architect would include in drawings, and Mid-Century Modern furniture. “It’s an interior but very much a stage set or a designed exhibition space, and I wanted it to go back and forth between them,” said Burin, a lecturer in Harvard’s visual arts department who teaches drawing. “Pre-Arranged Comfort” is an imagined exhibition of work by designer and activist Fran Hosken, who in 1944 was among the first women to receive a master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. With access to Hosken’s archives, Burin collected postwar photographs of Hosken and marketing shots of some of the early furniture she produced after establishing her design business, Hosken Inc., in 1951. There is a model of a Slovakian mountain chalet, swaths of vinyl on the walls in bold blues and yellows to imply outlines of interior rooms and a narrow wall rising nearly to the ceiling that has been covered by a blown-up photograph of a fur blanket, so on first inspection it looks like rushing water, or marbled meat or the frosted peaks of a chocolate cake. “I loved the images surrounding Hosken, these staged photos of her standing with a cigarette, and I wanted to foreground those to blur the line between exhibition itself, the object of the exhibition and the telling of her story,” Burin said. In 2012, Burin had a similar show at Ratio 3, “Andrejova-Molnár Papers,” an elaborate fiction about a character named Petra Andrejova-Molnár, or P.A., an Eastern European female architect, complete with photos and design drawings documenting her life. Burin studied, shot and re-created period-style photographs of architects in their offices, manipulating them to mimic that distinctive look of degradation.