Ryan Nordlund, Skull Houses, Citadel, Northwest Calgary (detail), 2007, colour transparency. Collection of the artist.

Gordon Matta-Clark, Fresh Kill, 1972. Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.

David Hoffos, Catastrophe, 1998, six-channel video and audio installation with mixed media, variable dimensions. Courtesy of the artist and TrépanierBaer Gallery.
Photo: Tara Nicholson

Kyohei Sakaguchi, A Zero Yen House with Solar System (replica), 2006, mixed media, 900 x 2200 x 1650 mm

Rita McKeough, Knockout, 1982, lithograph, 56 x 76 cm. Collection of the Walter Phillips Gallery, The Banff Centre.

 

 

Informal Architectures

Informal Architectures is an exhibition gathering the work of a number of artists exploring the intersections of architecture, social thought, and failure. The exhibition presents predominantly new works (some commissioned and produced by artists at The Banff Centre) with select historical works. When viewed together, these works form a narrative about the often unspoken role of architecture in controlling people.

This exhibition describes a contemporary landscape of social, political and cultural assumptions. These ideas are incorporated into the structures of the built environment —economic, physical and institutional—affecting the recent past, uncertain present and near future. In this landscape, technology and consumerism are the primary vehicles of a utopian modernity. But waste, materialism, entropy and abjection form incessant counter-narratives haunting modernity’s ideological projections. In and around these scenes of our post-9/11 environment, artists re-configure our surroundings.

While monumentality continues to weigh on contemporary art and architectural practices in western societies, alternative strategies in spatial culture have proliferated since the 1960s. By considering work by artists from diverse and unconventional perspectives, the assumptions and dream-narratives of modern art and architecture may be re-imagined. The artists in Informal Architectures visualize economies of both excess and lack— chocolate and dirt, shopping malls and ruins, humour and destruction—proposing alternative strategies and criteria for the creation, representation and inhabitation of space—or of how to be in the world.

Artists:
Lida Abdul, Edgar Arceneaux/ Vincent Galen Johnson/Olga Koumoundouros/Matthew Sloly, Eleanor Bond, Jimmie Durham, Dan Graham, David Hoffos, Luanne Martineau, Gordon Matta-Clark, Rita McKeough, Ryan Nordlund, William Pope.L, and Kyohei Sakaguchi.