2018: In the Natural Landscape the Human is an Intruder
solo exhibition at Sabot Gallery, Cluj, Romania
30 March – 12 May 2018
The exhibition explores some of the less conspicuous aspects of Modernism in the 20th century. In one half of the gallery, an imaginary world comes to dubious life, as it is populated by figures that result from enlarging micro-silhouettes for architectural sketches to a 1:1 scale – de-humanized or post-human (per Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley). Next to these, an extra-terrestrial alphabet emerges from the separation of the decorative and the functional in a series of Eastern European plant holders, which intersect an essentially modernist aesthetic and folkloric inspiration. In the second part of the exhibition, three columns with 15 by 15 tiles (standing, fallen and slanted) compose a grid that references directly twentieth-century modernity, but also invoke topics related to modern sculpture, the space race, and modernism as an accelerator of the Anthropocene.
The title of the exhibition is the caption of an illustration in John Ormsbee Simonds’ 1967 Landscape Architecture manual.
