Jeffrey Yasuo Mansfield is a design director at MASS Design Group and a Ford-Mellon Disability Futures fellow, whose work explores the relationships between architecture, landscape, and power. Jeffrey is a recipient of a Graham Foundation grant and a John W. Kluge Fellowship at the Library of Congress for his work on Architecture of Deafness, which explores how Deaf schools and other Deaf Spaces emerged as sites of cultural resistance. Jeffrey holds a Master of Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and an AB in Architecture from Princeton University. Deaf since birth, Jeffrey is a Yonsei, or fourth-generation, Japanese American, and attended a deaf school in Massachusetts, where his earliest intuitions about the relationship between aesthetics, geography, and power emerged.
Architecture of Deafness: 200 Years of the Deaf School
Incidents of Presence: Sensual Aesthetics and the Crisis of Meaning in the Asylum
Disarming Language, exhibition at Tallinn Art Hall, in collaboration with Christine Sun Kim and Niels Van Toome
Photo: Karel Koplimets
Gesture Drawings, a record of bodily movement, created by tracking hands in sign language performances and bodies in experimental dance—a complementary, yet otherwise unlikely, pairing of artistic mediums. Evoking the gestural movements in sign language and dance, these drawings are suggestive of various spatial and temporal forms into which the body is capable of morphing in its sensual drive.