Castles Burning / Room East

 CASTLES BURNING
11 January – 15 February 2015

STEVEN BALDI / JO NIGOGHOSSIAN / SEAN RASPET / CARLO SCARPA / AUGUSTUS THOMPSON

ROOM EAST
41 Orchard Street, New York
NY 10002


Castles
Burning, Installation View, Courtesy of Room East, New York

JO
NIGOGHOSSIAN, Levels (with steel and rubber crawler, clear) 2014 steel, urethane
rubber 58 x 72 x 55 inches

SEAN RASPET, Abatement Scenario (Flow Modification A01) 2014 – 2015 polyethylene sheeting,
aluminum and plastic spring-mounted adjustable pole system dimensions variable

SEAN RASPET, Inflection 2009-2010
 plexiglas with 2-way reflective coating, mirrored
plexiglas, stainless steel hardware and wall clock
 dimensions variable (25 x
23 x 9 inches)

AUGUSTUS THOMPSON, Toile
(For Autonomy) 2015
 UltraChrome on ticking 75 x 12 inches

AUGUSTUS
THOMPSON, Shared Memory Scenario IV 2014
 india ink and pencil on canvas 75 x 41
inches

STEVEN BALDI, Black Box
(Thomas Duncan Gallery East Wall L1) 2014
 book cloth and aluminum
 39.5 x
65.75 x 1 inches

CARLO SCARPA, Cinesi Vase, Model
513.3 1940 iridized glass 9 x 9 x9 inches

Castles
Burning, Installation View, Courtesy of Room East, New York



  To visit the Brion Tomb is to simultaneously step into the
future and the past. Such contradictions abound in the plan, which celebrates
life and death, infinity and confinement. Carlo Scarpa’s commission to design
the Brion family tomb in San Vito d’Altivole near Treviso,
Italy consumed the last decade of his career 1968-1978. With this site of
four acres he created a memorial, a monument, a tomb, and a total work of art.
Every aspect of its design from the imposing bunker-like cast concrete walls to
the refined marble stoup he designed for the holy water is a paradox. His
contrasting use of both precious and banal materials echoes his interest in
capturing darkness while revealing light throughout the structure. The garden
and the waterways fill the negative space between the structures and are
delimited by a massive boundary wall that culminates in two entrances, a
chapel, the burial site, a hortus conclusus of raised and sunken
elevations, and various mechanisms that close and open portals. The complex of
parts and passageways serves the living and dead, the hereafter and the
heretofore.

The exhibition at ROOM EAST features
a black opalescent vase designed by Scarpa for Venini, the venerable Venetian
glass company. Surrounding the vase is a selection of works by a group of
invited artists that capture the melancholic beauty of the architecture.
Materials such as mirrors and metals, canvas and book cloth, welded points and
bolts are present, all of which amount to abstractions of physical space.
Glints of red and steely grays punctuate an otherwise dichromatic palette of
black and white. The listlessness of dawn and dusk, bedfellows of transparency
and opacity, expose and veil aspects of the exhibition. Moreover, the ticking
of two clocks resonates among the works in a meditation upon the human
experience of the built environment. In Scarpa’s site, an aesthetic of
obsessive intricacy, where art deco meets the machine age, is a path to
something new. Akin to the mystery of an ancient ziggurat, the form of which
was predetermined long before our time, there is an elegiac quality to this
group of works.


All images Courtesy of Room East, New York