John Cleater

John Cleater received his master’s degree in Architecture from Columbia University in 1995. He is a founding member of the internationally acclaimed multi- media performance group, The Builders Association, and has created designs for several of their productions since 1993. Their most recent production House/ Divided is about the current housing foreclosure crisis and was presented at BAM NYC in Oct. 2012 and received a rave review in the New York Times. His interactive installation "Emergency Exit" was included in the exhibition "Digital Mapping in Architecture" at Artist Space in New York, and received critical acclaim in 1998. Cleater worked with Asymptote Architecture for many years where he was project architect for clients including NYSE, Documenta XI, Venice Biennale 2000, Eyebeam, The Guggenheim, and others. Cleater has also worked on projects with Vito Acconci, Bernard Tschumi, Daniel Libeskind, I.M. Pei, and others. He has taught multidisciplinary studios at NYU’s I.T.P., Columbia University’s EMC, and in Adelaide Australia. Since his 2007 artist residency in the Kohler Foundry, Cleater has been re-imagining his cast sculpture series, Appendages, into artist housing/studios in Texas, a media pavilion for Art OMI, a Theater complex in Rwanda, and his own Studio in Columbia County, NY. Cleater has shown his drawings, sculpture, and installations at the following venues in upstate New York: Clermont Historic Site, CR10, Nicole Fiacco Gallery, Thompson Giroux Gallery, and Incident Report.

Most recently, Cleater has been developing augmented reality (AR) installations. I Must Be Seeing THINGS, at FACT in Liverpool, UK and The Hermetic Museum at Corcoran Gallery 31 in Washington D.C. Sky Pavilions: Virtual Cloudbursts have been installed in Singapore, DUMBO, The High Line NYC, Venice Biennale, OMI, Istanbul, Los Angeles, and elsewhere and can be viewed on smart phones by using the free app LAYAR.

Cleater is on the advisory board for OMI International Arts Center's Architecture OMI program in upstate New York. At OMI Cleater curated and participated in the successful AR exhibition Peeling Layers of Space Out of Thin Air in 2011 that received mentions in the Wall St. Journal and Architect’s Newspaper. Participants for the Peeling show included Acconci Studio, Asymptote, Studio Daniel Libeskind, SHoP, SITE, Leeser Architecture, KOL/MAC, and Cleater.