EUTOPIA

DPMT7

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DPMT7, Weston Art Gallery (by Tony Walsh)

 

DPMT7
Un Teatro del Nuovo
Weston Art Gallery, Cincinnatti, OH [link]

Elevating the ubiquitous structures of urban construction, the semi-temporary systems of renewal become the allegorical model for a new norm. An opera of the common displaced within the institution inverts and dissolves the typical, reversing context of exterior (mundane) to interior (sacred) and allowing the secular elevation to the epiphanistic.
With an elevated singing platform, 360-degree video montage, and craggy lumber stelae the intent unfolds as a more delicate archeology where one engages ghosts of primal ritualization: a brief poetic, insane glorification of the nomadic, ever-present ignored… the laborious modern religious sacrifice performed for the city.

~ Ryder Richards
photos courtesy of the Weston Art Gallery (by Tony Walsh) and the author

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John Hejduk

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John Hejduk
Jan Palach Memorial [link]
Cooper Union, New York

House of Suicide and House of Mother of Suicide

As architectural meditations, John Hejduk’s constructions are uncharacteristically rootless- tentative inhabitants that stir a moment till eternity, elusive appearances that despite their eventual departure, are forever marked in memory. Inspired by David Schapiro’s poem, two spiky structures at a distance mark an immutable act – paying tribute to Jan Palach who in 1968 set himself on fire in protest of the Soviet’s occupation of Czechoslovakia, and to his mother. Concurrently, against a newly deleterious milieu imbued by demoralizing declarations of intolerance, they are the incarnated spirit of freedom; and in New York, finally, a binding reminder of events and memorial.

~ Ali Soltani

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Dennis Maher

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Photo: Tom Little, courtesy of The Mattress Factory

Photo: Tom Little, courtesy of The Mattress Factory

Dennis Maher
A Second Home [2016]
architectural salvage, construction materials, antique furnishings, toys, architectural models, video projections, audio
The Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh [link]

Maher’s immersive installation transports the viewer into a miniature, magical world of curious inventions and constructions. Utilizing current trends in architecture and design, repurposing and salvaging are key strategies of the project. However, Maher’s work goes beyond reuse. By embedding objects from the Mattress Factory’s original inhabitants and building a parallel, kinetic world inside the historic site, the three-story evolving structure poses questions about the role between history, site and object. Rather than creating architecture with specific form and function, the artist challenges the viewer to conform his/her body and viewing perspective to adapt to Maher’s “Second Home”—one that is disorienting, but miraculous to behold.

~ Colette Copeland
 images courtesy of the author, photo credit: Colette Copeland
images courtesy of The Mattress Factory, photo credit: Tom Little

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Laetitia Soulier

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The Fractal Architectures series

Laetitia Soulier “The Matryoshka Dolls 2″_40in x 80in_C Print, courtesy of Claire Oliver Gallery

 

Laetitia Soulier
Fractal Architectures
Claire Oliver Gallery, New York [link]
February 26- April 9, 2016

I am reminded of the perspectival loom of the Quattrocento period in early Renaissance when viewing the pictures of Laetitia Soulier as though experiencing a subliminal stroboscope that rapidly alternates between a still shot and it’s underlying mathematical lattice-work on which it is constructed. The viewer is plunged into a kinematic rotorelief of pulsating fractals and figures that through a juxtaposition of contrasting scales is effectively internalized, subject to the same perceptive inquisition it employed to examine things. The installation serves as a threshold to an un-folding itinerary from where one emerges like a charged Baudlairean kalaidoscope gifted with consciousness.

~ Ali Soltani
images courtesy of the artist and Claire Oliver Gallery

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Hippie Modernism

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Clark Richert, View of Drop City, “The Complex” in El Morro, outside Trinidad, CO, Circa 1966. courtesy of Walker Art Center

Hippie Modernism: The Struggle For Utopia
Curated by Andrew Blauvelt
Walker Art Center [link]
Minneapolis, Minnesota
October 24, 2015 – February 28, 2016

“Hippie Modernism” offers an engaging combination of sociopolitical, economic and aesthetic inquiries of the 1960’s and 70’s without the pejorative use of terms. Pragmatic, intuitive and political methodologies for a new age include perception-shifting headgear, inflatable architecture, temporary cities on islands, educational literature, “truckitecture”, and negative utopias. Heineken developed bottles for building materials and Info-Gonks were 1968’s Google Glass. The exhibition demonstrates with prescient physicality the creative, freethinking nature often dismissed as a “hippie pipe-dream.” As evidenced in overwhelming detail at the Walker, the era’s core values are still a driving force in current politics, architecture, art, and design.

~ Jake Weigel
images courtesy of Walker Art Center

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Plural: 9/11 Memorial

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memorial3

9/11 Memorial
Michael Arad (architect), Peter Walker and Partners (landscape architects)
New York, New York

The 9/11 Memorial is an unfortunate success. Vast dual cubic wounds swallow torrents of water, forming inverse fountains guarded by the names of the lost. The names, a gesture towards humanization, spark an abstracted empathy quickly obstructed by smiling tourists posing for selfies: social capital trumping intent and decorum. The site functions as grand destination park, nominally about remembrance and devoid of mourning, except within the distastefully toppling museum providing commoditized relief. The scale echoes the symbolic, versus statistic, value of the tragedy, flexing green-space to life against a voracious market, signaling vast power in the economics of loss.

~ Ryder Richards

Ruins are self evident historical palimpsests fundamentally different than designed memorials.  Here the opportunity to mark and preserve the sacred site of an epic calamity and the memory of those who lost their lives is given to a flattened corporate park surrounded by a haphazard display of new skyscrapers. The awe at the sight of the reflecting pools at the footprint of towers owed to their massive scale is a short lived spectacle; having seen one, the casual visitor might peek, but is unlikely to pause for a redundant scene which nullifies the whole idea of reflecting let alone memorialization. 

~ Ali Soltani

images by Ryder Richards

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