Informal Architectures · June 22 to September 23
Curated by Anthony Kiendl
Opening Reception: Friday, June 22 · 7 p.m. to 9 p.m.
Curator and artists’ tour: Saturday, June 23 · 2 p.m. to 4 p.m.
Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre · Information: 403.762.6281
Presented as part of the 2007 Banff Summer Arts Festival
Luanne Martineau’s work Parasite Buttress, a flesh-like form that can double as a mattress, descends from the gallery wall and unfurls across the floor. Its web of punched felt, a sickly pink-beige with frills and nodules of “fingers and toes” poking from the surface, is an organic accommodation to the space it occupies. It’s one of 14 works, some commissioned and created at The Banff Centre, that make up Informal Architectures, opening June 22 at the Centre’s Walter Phillips Gallery and curated by Anthony Kiendl.
Starting with an examination of the modern built environment, Informal Architectures asks artists to react to popular notions of economic, physical, and institutional structures. The show interprets the collision between the modern ideal of a technological and consumerist utopia, and the dread of waste, entropy, and failure that haunts the edges of these sunny projections. The artists envision new ways of inhabiting space in the modern world in the midst of wild excess and stark destitution.
Artists with work in Informal Architectures include William Pope.L, who will install Historic Building, a temporary structure that oozes 100 gallons of chocolate syrup. Dan Graham’s Death By Chocolate: West Edmonton Shopping Mall, is an eight-minute video representing footage spanning two visits shot 20 years apart in the iconic mall, and matches the artist’s many essays on the structural manifestations of consumer capitalism. Video and performance artist Lida Abdul will install two video works including Dome, a film that centres on a small Afghan child in the midst of war. Newly commissioned works by Jimmie Durham, Eleanor Bond, Edgar Arceneaux, Matthew Sloly, Vincent Galen Johnson, and Olga Koumoundouros have never been shown to the public before.
Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1972 work, a 16mm film called Fresh Kill, documents the complete destruction of the artist’s truck (which he nicknamed Herman Meydag) by a bulldozer. Before he died in 1978 at the age of 34, Matta-Clark built a reputation for audacious, large-scale deconstructions of built structures. David Hoffos’s Catastrophe uses installation, small-scale representations of classic disasters, and projection techniques to fully put the viewer into an illusory realm.
Calgary-based audio, installation, and performance artist Rita McKeough will create a new version of her installation and performance Long Haul. The piece imagines the “voice” of the natural world as it struggles to co-exist with modern built civilization. Accompanied by a motorized tree, McKeough will comb the streets of Banff collecting natural materials for Long Haul beginning at 3:30 p.m. in Banff’s Bison Courtyard on June 22.
On at the Walter Phillips Gallery through September 23, Informal Architectures also includes work by Calgary artist Ryan Nordlund, and Japanese artist/architectural designer Kyohei Sakaguchi..
This exhibition was funded in part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, as part of a Research Creation in the Fine Arts grant hosted by The Banff Centre. Informal Architectures is also supported by The Canada Council for the Arts and Alberta Foundation for the the Arts.
