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Atopos
Bill Barrette
Pablo Neruda
Iair Rosenkranz
Allan Wexler
Curated by Osvaldo Romberg
8 April – 5 June 1999
Osvaldo Romberg chooses five artists/architects who present a metaphoric
relationship to the city in lucid, political, photographic and poetic
forms.
Atopos: Architecture<>Urbanism (Jane Harrison and David Turnbull)
present Multiplication and Subdivision, an inventory of roads as
the signature of routine. This duo is committed to developing speculative
forms of architecture and conducting research into the emergent
form of the contemporary city.
Bill Barrette exhibits his sculpture Under the Bridge, along with
three photographic books that relate to the theme of urban representation.
While collaborating with writers as well as using the street as
studio, the work delves into the exploration and the mystery of
the city as a poetic venue.
Pablo Neruda’s poem “The Heights of Macchu Picchu”
adds to the show a testament to a utopia of the past, written about
a time and space whereby architecture had a hold of true aura…Neruda’s
vision of the magnitude of a city on a mountain peak as an allegiance
of a collectivity with nature to create beauty and justice.
Iair Rosenkranz’s installation The Pre-Textual City is a ‘mapped’
record of a conversation between the artist and a friend…a
virtual encyclopedic city of the mind constructed by signs and symbols
of architecture around the world, built or unbuilt, motivated by
the real, in this case, New York.
Allan Wexler’s Umbrella Condensation Collector, a masterful
piece melding the functional and the aesthetic, was originally done
in the desert sand of Israel in 1995. Placing stones in upside-down,
imported New York City umbrellas, Wexler explored how the daytime
heat held in the stones caused condensation during the cool nights.
The Bedouin village experiment is recreated here at White Box.
In hopes of recapturing the poetic origin of human endeavors, Romberg
proposes “Unquiet Urbanism”, a show that offers an alternative
source of inspiration to architecture.
PRESS
Show: Unquiet Urbanism
Publication: The New York Times
Writer: Ken Johnson
Date: 05.28.99
Title: Unquiet Urbanism
The curator Osvaldo Romberg casts a
poetically oblique light on architecture and the city in this group
show. Bill Barrette’s sculpture presents gritty, photographic
city views through distorting lenses; Iair Rosenkranz’s Pre-Textual
City is an elaborate, impenetrable game of architectural history;
Alan Wexler’s inverted, stone-filled umbrellas are a mystery,
and a team called atopos maps suburban police activity. |
