EUTOPIA

Numen/For Use

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Numen/For Use "Tape Tokyo 02" @ 2121 Design Sight, 2017_ photo by Ryder Richards

Numen/For Use “Tape Tokyo 02” @ 21_21 Design Sight, 2017_ photo by Ryder Richards

Numen/For Use
Tape Tokyo 02
Grand Projects—How Far Will You Go?
21_21 Design Sight,
→
GRAND PROJECTS: HOW FAR WILL YOU GO?
21_21 DESIGN SIGHT
by Exhibition Director, Naoko Aono
Tokyo, Japan [link]

Tethered and taught, 21,120 meters of tape stretch into a translucent organ, squeaking and groaning as squirming, curious museum goers crawl through its aortal expanses. Choosing populist excess –cheap tape and labor instead of high-end fabrication— allows patrons near familiarity, prompting magical wonder at the common’s transformative ability. Inside the womb, externalities of sight and sound muted, the individual is left to entertain the alien familiarity of an organic space, or retreat from such existentialism to our digital umbilicus as experiential intermediary. Externally, the blurred shadow’s peristaltic migration is regarded, jealously, as the latest morsel consuming a novelty.

~ Ryder Richards
all images by the author

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Tatzu Nishi

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Tatzu Nishi
“Capsule Hotel 21”
Grand Projects—How Far Will You Go?
21_21 Design Sight,
→
GRAND PROJECTS: HOW FAR WILL YOU GO?
21_21 DESIGN SIGHT
Tokyo, Japan [link]
Through October 1st, 2017

Constructing a capsule hotel in Ando’s elegant architecture, Nishi’s project transforms the public space into a semi-private space, raising questions about rising costs of real estate and the growing divide between middle and upper classes in Tokyo. His use of rudimentary, inexpensive materials and decision to leave the foam insulation seams visible, further contrasts the sleek, minimal gallery located in one of Tokyo’s poshest neighborhoods. Unlike many container hotel rooms that resemble refrigerated morgue drawers, Nishi’s pods are surrounded by glass and stunning views of the park with rates free of charge, if only for a short nap.

~ Colette Copeland
images courtesy of Ryder Richards and the author

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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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