The Empire Never Ended

About

3.32pm, on the 16th March, 1972 the world witnessed the demolition of the Pruitt Igoe housing estate. Taking place only 5 years after the projects completion it was an action that heralded for many the death of Modernism. Comprised of 32 towers it was a spectacular failure of 20th Century utopian ideologies. The scenario is explored within the exhibition through a series of new works that unpack the failings within post war urban planning and the troubled relationship between architecture and social reform. It presents us with both a fictional past and an unlikely future. The work exposes the chasm between the materiality in visual and verbal languages, trapping its self between severe rationalist paradoxes in a relentless habit of self-definition. Through processes that include lighting, drawing sculpture and print-making these new works critique the core ethics of extreme rationalism, the monolithic and the underlying rhetoric of the Modernist ideal, with a particular interest in the post war Romanticisation of proletariat life. In turn certain aesthetics of the Modernist movement are folded back further to reflect upon contemporary values of the gallery space itself as a site of artistic happening.