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Continuing a curatorial program of experiments, collaborations and interdisciplinary projects, the Gallery at REDCAT presents Small Museum for the American Metaphor September 27 to November 30, 2014.
REDCAT gallery curator Ruth Estévez invited the Belgian architect Kersten Geers to develop the exhibition, which focuses on themes that are clearly evident in the architectural work he creates with his firm, OFFICE Kersten Geers and David Van Severen.
As Geers explains: “Small Museum for the American Metaphor is an exhibition bringing together European perspectives on the American West, and more specifically, the particularities embedded in the idealized fictions surrounding it. The visual argument here is that there is a certain architectonic idea that dwells on the celebration of ‘Endlessness’ as mythicized in the American West. This metaphor is the base for an architecture that blurs the distinction between building and object, collapsing the different scales. It is an architecture that celebrates the fiction of the ‘wide open’ and seeks to re-evaluate/reinterpret the world as a ‘gigantic interior.’ In this context, a successful intervention is able to define hierarchies, carve out places, and make shared points of reference. The exhibition, much in the tradition of showcasing objects in a defined space such as a cabinet of curiosities, ‘collects’ artworks, architectural models, drawings and other elements that consciously fade the distinction between object and representation.
The exhibition features works from artists, designers and architects including John Baldessari, Baukuh, Koenraad Dedobbeleer, Stefano Graziani, JOHNSTONMARKLEE, Rita McBride, Jonathan Muecke, Jonathan Olivares, Manfred Pernice, OFFICE KGDVS, Bas Princen, Ettore Sottsass, Saul Steinberg, Harald Thys & Jos de Gruyter, Richard Venlet, Christopher Williams, Ed Ruscha, Michaël Van den Abeele, Peter Wächtler, two new commissioned installations by Pieter Vermeersch and Valerie Mannaerts, as well as models of past and present architectures of the "big box.”
Guest Curator Kersten Geers (b. 1975, Ghent) studied at the University of Ghent and at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura in Madrid, Spain. He worked in Rotterdam for Maxwan/Max.1 Architects until 2001 and from 2001 to 2005 for Neutelings Riedijk Architects. He was a tutor at the TU Delft, the University of Ghent and the Accademia di Architettura di Mendrisio, and a guest lecturer and guest critic for the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam, and Columbia University in New York, among other institutions. In 2002 he founded Office Kersten Geers David Van Severen together with David Van Severen. In 2008 they were awarded with the Belgian Prize for Architecture and in 2010 with the Silver Lion at the 12th Venice Biennial of Architecture.
Gallery at REDCAT is open Tuesdays through Sundays from noon to 6pm or until intermission, closed Mondays. Admission is always free.
Title
Gallery at REDCAT Presents “Small Museum for the American Metaphor”Website
From
September 27, 2014 06:00 PMUntil
November 30, 2014 09:00 PMVenue
Gallery at REDCATAddress
631 West 2nd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012, USA