HWS News
18 June 2025 • Arts The Davis Gallery Extends its Footprint Virtually
Spatial data technology extends the reach of works on display at Houghton House’s gallery.
As curator, Jordan directs the Davis Gallery at Houghton House and oversees HWS’ art collection. In her role, she works closely with faculty and students to bring collection objects into the classroom, offer internships and curate a variety of exhibitions in the Davis Gallery.
This past academic year, as a Fisher Center Fellow, Jordan focused on expanding access to the art collection. In the process, she collaborated with Assistant Professor of Art and Architecture Max Piersol ’16, whose work with 360-degree imaging and LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology offered a new perspective on space and accessibility. Jordan recognized the potential of this technology to prolong engagement with gallery exhibitions and broaden the audience for the artists’ work.
Research shows that virtual gallery tours serve not as a substitute for in-person visits but as valuable supplement. Visitors increasingly use virtual tours as an initial approach tool and a post-visit tool to appreciate spaces and artworks to their fullest.
Matterport cameras, which use a laser scanning to precisely measure and digitize physical spaces, create navigable environments that replicate the experience moving through a gallery. While often associated with real estate, the technology is being used in experimental ways by architects, artists and researchers such as Piersol.
“I am interested in its limits, in what it can’t do as much as what it can do,” Piersol says. “I use it less to communicate polished spaces the way a real estate company or a gallery might use it but more to complicate what those spaces might represent.’
Piersol uses the technology to capture spatial residue, which he defines as the temporary conditions, the nebulous boundaries and ecological or historical atmosphere of a space. Matterport helps him understand and represent space differently than traditional architectural drawings can, in part because it can represent space as undetermined and evolving, which he says, “is deeply aligned with certain aesthetic and theoretical ideas I work with in art and architecture.”
Now using the technology in the Davis Gallery, Jordan has created immersive digital tours for recent exhibitions that are saved. Connecting the camera to her phone via an app, she documents the gallery using a series of 360-degree scans. For the most recent show, she captured 50 individual points throughout the space, offering virtual visitors the ability to examine artworks from a variety of angles.
For Jordan’s students who help curate shows, they too were able to share links with friends and family who couldn’t visit the gallery in person. It also helps future artists connect with the space before they visit it.
“We have an artist coming next October. She lives in Nevada,” Jordan says. “Normally, I used to send visiting artists the architectural plan for wall lengths and things like that, but now I can send along the page of Matterport tours so they can walk through space and see how we’ve used it.”
Named in recognition of Clarence A. (Dave) Davis, Jr. '48, the Davis Gallery at Houghton House is the exhibition space of the Department of Art and Architecture. The Gallery has six shows each year beginning with a faculty exhibition and ending the year with a student exhibition. The Gallery is closed for the summer but will reopen on Thursday, Sept. 11 for Piersol’s exhibition "New Point Comfort."
Top: At the Davis Gallery in Houghton House, students admire artwork at the year-end student art and architecture show.
