CONSTRUCT NYC
This exhibition borrows its title from the name of a sequence of works by the American artist Barbara Kasten. Created in the early 80s, Kasten’s “Construct NYC” is a series of photographs depicting different small-scale architectural environments carefully arranged in Kasten’s studio.
These “stage-sets” consist of combinations of geometric figures made from industrial materials, as well as neoclassical sculptural elements – forms reminiscent of those found in the skyscrapers surrounding Kasten’s studio in Chicago. The colourful photographs, which are created by using Hollywood lighting techniques, seem to document the tension between our presumptions about reality and the artist’s management of physical materials and their intrinsic qualities – a tension exposed by the precision of camera angles. Correspondingly, this exhibition of photography under the same title considers architecture both as a process of mental activity and a political practice, a form of communication which is seen leaking and stretching in different directions, accompanied by the urge to construct and the proximity of void.