Untitled (Nests, Shells, and Corners)
Curated by Ken Wood
A house constitutes a body of images that give mankind proofs or illusions of stability. We are constantly re-imagining its reality: to distinguish all these images would be to describe the soul of the house; it would mean developing a veritable psychology of the house.
- Gaston Bachelard, “The House: from Cellar to Garret”, from The Poetics of Space
Six artists rethink the way we see and occupy places. Some look for beauty in the banal, or subvert the roles traditionally ascribed to the basic elements of architecture: the wall may become the oculus instead of the support; the column may become a place of transient impermanence instead of the structure that prevents collapse; the service space becomes the dwelling. Others talk about the appropriation and displacement of cultural icons that were made to
hold history in a fixed, rooted placement. Small scale and large scale get inverted, and monuments of permanence get toted off in duffel bags.