POLYTOPIA
City Center
Multi-media construction
32" x 32" x 32"
Various found and repurposed objects, Motors, Leds, Embedded video and sound.
Click on image for larger view.
As an initial reaction to the upsurge of urban development affecting the Hollywood and downtown Los Angeles areas since 2015, these exponents of a mock architecture and tongue-in-cheek urban planning are not scaled-down models of a would-be metropolis. Rather, they emulate city structures by amalgamating unlikely objects, contrasting in scale and material, to effect a dimensional shift of perspective, between inner and outer, public and private registers.
If the encounter of self and others is the cornerstone of a city and the relationship to our body, a reflection of the constructs we inhabit, it would follow that Polis (as city and body of citizens) and Topos (as place, location, locality) consistently coincide in our search for fulfillment.
There is a persistent heterogeneity to the materials and methods used in these elaborate tinkerings, from traditional craftwork to a re-arrangement of either found or off-the-shelf consumer objects and If these bricolages daftly orchestrate an array of methods and techniques, blurring disciplines, they also play on the ideology/utopia tandem that stretches from Aristotle's Polis to "Sex and the City".
The diverse buildings are concentrations of interests, vocations, and disciplines, silos of mores and dynamos of applicable concepts, houses of pleasure, correction or a myriad of other social formation, clustered in a mix of innovation and archaism.
Thus 'Emancipation Plaza' is the home of the 'Homunculus Hegemon', ensconced in a cockpit looming over 'Inferno Square', gazing across its ventilated abyss at the animated shopfronts of the 'Atavistic Gender Pavilion'…
Welcome to Polytopia!