POLYTOPIA
Installation
There is a standard of proportion without which paucity or excess would not make sense. The widely accepted notion of man as the measure of all things having come under much scrutiny, a silent consensus still prevails as to where the center of gravity of all relativisms falls. Human subjectivity, conflicted as it may be, continues to occupy that epicenter and maintains its mode of operation by assigning value to objects. This translates into the predominance of a master plan holding objects hostages to a single context or background. Jungle and desert are the too much and not enough bookends of human perception but from an object’s vantage, there is a plane, the largest object among them, that subtracts itself to keep the integrity of each of their individual backdrops.
In the topographic multiplicity of the Polytopia constructions, the Polis is such a plane, considered from the angle of a conglomerate of objects whose arrangement supersedes the predominance of an overarching plan. Amalgams of instruments and representational vestiges, clusters of trophies and cosmetic items, means of residence and locomotion are the cradle and tomb of those who pass through them, making a city’s imbrication of contexts an unfurling ecosystem. The tools and consumer goods, segments of ready-made behavior and prosthetic mannerism quicken in a cauldron of heterogenous mixture, like a 3-dimensional version of the graffiti laden walls seen in many cities where diverse elements float in a space of their own and new ones are constantly superimposed. A palimpsest of constructs, the Polis, untamed wolf that suckles Remus and Romulus is an anthropophagic incubator, in turn the protective armor and the naked splendor of a body that stems new growth from a decomposing soup of elements. What leads the repurposed objects to excess is the deflation of their assigned value, the freedom from servility hurling them in a maximalism that bestows animacy, in all its wild vivacity to the humdrum, everyday objects we surround ourselves with.
Installation views of Polytopia Multimedia Trilogy: