What caught my eye was his piece entitled “/Building/ No. 36. Passage Space Hinge”.

Insley’s usage of monotonic lines to create a isometric perspective work of art is a bit overwhelming in areas. The patterns of lines work together to create a three-dimensional structure which appears to be moving underneath the surface.  The over-use of Pointillism is quite plentiful; this is more pronounced on the areas outside of the structure.

It is quite obvious that Insley felt his work as a potential architect would have been more appreciated on canvas instead of rolled
away on a blueprint. After finding this piece, I decided to dig around some to find the real ‘meaning’ behind his work. The artist described his own interests as having “very little to do with advanced planning theories of the present” and no relation really at all to the ”utopias of the future, but rather with the dark cities of mythology, which exist outside of normal times in some strange location of extremity.”

Insley’s monolithic project ‘Foundations OneCity’ took around fourty years of his time, starting in the 1950s.

Building 36, on display at the NC Museum of Art

The idea behind OneCity was to have the United States encompass “one city” that spread from the Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi and would be the home of 400 million people.  The city was composed of 14,000 city square buildings, each 2-and-a-half-miles wide and each containing 100 rooms. The grandiose structure is designed to  divide the ‘day people’ or normals, and ‘night people’ aka weirdos between upper and lower sections, respectively.

Building 25

Building 17

Insley’s contemporary, seemingly endless lines and points are truly hypnotizing and bring on a world of wonder.

Will Insley, 1959-2011