EUTOPIA

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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Anders Ruhwald

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Jerry Birchfield; Anders Ruhwald; art; photography; sculpture

Anders Ruhwald, Unit 1: 3583 Dubois, 2016. Site specific installation. Dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist and Volume Gallery. Image: Jerry Birchfield

Anders Ruhwald
Unit 1: 3583 Dubois (2016)
Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland [link]

In lieu of any impulse to glorify the beauty of dilapidated buildings, a persistent cliché running rampant in rust belt communities, this exhibition instead gives rise to an immersive experience of dereliction and renewal. Soot cover walls, dimly lit rooms, and claustrophobic spaces are derived from the artist’s experience of a rundown Detroit building. The front door was excavated from the actual site and re-­‐installed in the gallery as the physical entrance for the installation. Charred interiors surround sculptural forms radiation with heat, presenting a metaphorical paradox of entropy, where destruction and decay are congruent with growth and transformation.

~ Joseph Karlovec
Photos: courtesy of MOCA Cleveland, the artist, and Volume Gallery;
Image: Jerry Birchfield

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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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Nick Barbee

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Nick Barbee
Ask Forgiveness [2015]
galleryHOMELAND, Houston [link]

Part pastiche, part living history, Nick Barbee’s Ask Forgiveness alloys his most beloved museums, scaled as a dollhouse. Everyone is a curator now, but need this be endorsed? Some of Barbee’s miniaturized galleries focus on artworks recreated from memory (Jacques-Louis David’s Emperor Napoleon? Let the sleuthing begin…), others on architecture: Menil’s hidden gardens, Hirshhorn’s dominating curves. Influence is always embedded in a work of art – Barbee just cites his sources. Models are proposals for real space: this is proposal as think piece, conditioned by idiosyncrasy, re-inscription, and the (not undue) demand that our art institutions do more, be more.

~ Kelly Montana
 images courtesy of the artist

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Andrés Jaque

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150620 A Jaque Cosmo PS1 002

Andres Jaque, “Cosmo” image: Miguel de Guzmán. Imagen Subliminal

Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation
COSMO
Young Architects Program
Museum of Modern Art PS1, New York [link]

Galilean orbital irrigation structures are linked to diagrammatic catenary arcs: a cat’s cradle mapping water passage to suspended planetary-plants rising from mobile platforms. Part sci-fi rave aesthetic, part applied –if arcane— ecological science, the device purifies New York’s increasingly toxic water supply under the guise of a futuristic urban, social garden.

Utilizing locally sourced components and plants (to be returned) COSMO exposes previously hidden industrial domains as potentially manageable, vibrant and locally viable systems. Enmeshed within an art-party glamour the glowing, lollipop seduction verifies that ecosystemic infrastructure, when properly manifested, can also serve as a social aggregator and communal purifier.

~ Ryder Richards
images credit: Miguel de Guzmán. Imagen Subliminal

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David Chipperfield

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David Chipperfield
Neu Nationalgalerie, Berlin [link]

British starchitect David Chipperfield is about to embark on a mission undesired by many: refurbish one of Modernity’s most striking icons – Mies Van der Rohe’s Neu Nationalgalerie in Berlin. As the ultimate physical manifestation of Mies’ “Less is more” architectural motto, the gallery’s geometrical precision and aesthetic perfection must remain unharmed during the imminent restoration, which began this month with a ‘prologue’: an installation by Chipperfield,  consisting of 144 tree-trunk columns inserted to the column-less free glass-encased space,  following the grid of the six feet-thick ceiling hovering above. Resembling a temple, the site-specific installation seems like a last apologetic gesture moments before his blasphemous renovation -the real intervention- begins.

~Gili Merin
photographs courtesy of Gili Merin

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