Exhibitions

A 5th Ecology invites over 25 architects, artists and designers to explore ways in which Reyner Banham’s reading of Los Angeles can inform our inquiry of the city today.
In 1971, the noted British architectural historian Reyner Banham wrote his seminal book on the city—Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies. In 1972, Banham returned to Los Angeles with a BBC documentary crew to film a homage to the city with which he was so enthralled. Using Baede-Kar—a fictitious audio tour guide—Banham drove across Los Angeles meeting artists, filmmakers, and diner waitresses, enthusiastically extolling the qualities of the sprawling metropolis. In so doing, Banham, the auto-flanuer, part historian and part provocateur, created a new form of critic and an alternative model for studying the city. ‘A 5th Ecology’ examines the under-exposed history of the sprawling metropolis and how to use it as a lens through which to view the contemporary city.

curated by Scrap Marshall & Berenika Boberska

October 2017

WuHo

As the cat climbed over the top of
the jamcloset first the right forefoot
carefully then the hind stepped down into the pit of the empty flowerpot
— William Carlos Williams, Poem (As the cat)

A cat reflects our emotions like a mirror; the subtlety of a cat’s movement can describe time and space in thousands of ways. A Point of View of a Cat introduces the cat as a narrative form, as well as a vehicle for exploration of material and space. This two-fold exhibit delivers the representational and the abstract as two independent vocabularies, which operate on their own terms, yet sometimes intersect each other in the actions of a cat. As hu- mans, we may never know the exact cat experience. Therefore, the exhibit focuses on cat behavior as it is visible to us, and specifically on how cats animate, fragment, and abstract everyday objects. Works included in the show can be divided into two categories: cat scenes and cat artifacts. The first is narrative, representational, animated and seductive. The second is abstract and material-driven; it vaguely refers to household environment and objects we would like to engage with if we were indoor cats (food, fabric, wood, concrete, plastic, etc). The show was inspired by the philoso- phy of Richard Rorty, which advocates that simultaneous use of multiple vocabularies results in a richer experience of the world.

Group Exhibition

Gallery “9” Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia

Gallery “9”, Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia