The New Paradigm: Models, Diagrams, Proposals and Provisions for...

Tue, 16 Feb 2010 11:08:00 -0600

The New Paradigm: Models, Diagrams, Proposals and Provisions for the Coming Age. Opening at The Pavilion, March 4th, 2010.

For locals, False Creek refers to the short inlet that lies at...

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 01:31:00 -0600

For locals, False Creek refers to the short inlet that lies at the centre of the city, and is the geographical centre for many of the Olympic-related activities that are taking place in Vancouver. False Creek was named by the explorer George Richards in the mid-19^thCentury after realizing that what he had hoped would be a passage to a rich coal deposit led to a dead end. Today False Creek resonates with other layers of both optimism and failure which the latest real estate and park developments draw attention to as the try to suture various social and economic gaps.

To use a sports analogy, this exhibition represents a ‘false start’ as the artists have taken for granted that the near future will be devastated by an environmental disaster, most likely of our own making. On the other hand, T&T’s drawings, sculptures and recycled engineering solutions should be seen as a creative ‘warm up’ for a future rendered carnivalesque and picturesque in contrast to the sublime doom and gloom of Mad Max or Waterworld. In this whimsical and astute work, T&T have imagined a future situation where the hubris of progress and civilization has been replaced by a new confident relationship between art, technology and nature, reliant on an artistic and stylistic gleaning of the past.

T&T False Creek: Pendulum Gallery, February 5 - March 3, 2010, curated by Patrik Andersson.

Sail boat.

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 01:24:22 -0600

Sail boat.

Light house.

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 01:23:25 -0600

Light house.

Paddle Wheeler.

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 01:22:25 -0600

Paddle Wheeler.

False Creek raft studies & construction.

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 01:19:00 -0600

False Creek raft studies & construction.

False Creek, 2010.

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 01:15:21 -0600

False Creek, 2010.

Birdhouse.

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 01:01:00 -0600

Birdhouse.

Birdhouse for the Boundary Layer, Grande Prairie Alberta.

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 00:57:00 -0600

Birdhouse for the Boundary Layer, Grande Prairie Alberta.

Architectural shelter study.

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 00:43:00 -0600

Architectural shelter study.

Shelter studies, Dana Saskatchewan.

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 00:39:00 -0600

Shelter studies, Dana Saskatchewan.

Everything’s Gonna Be OK

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 00:26:04 -0600

Everything’s Gonna Be OK

T&T project commission for No.9: Contemporary Art & the...

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 00:23:00 -0600

T&T project commission for No.9: Contemporary Art & the Environment.

Photo

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 00:13:00 -0600

Stenval, 2009.

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 00:04:00 -0600

Stenval, 2009.

2. Hope The creative hobos who inhabit this post-apocalyptic...

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 23:47:00 -0600

2. Hope

The creative hobos who inhabit this post-apocalyptic landscape appear to have imaginatively misread and recycled some of the most striking remains from our recent past. Things such as geodesic domes, automobiles and contemporary architecture have been re-assembled with simple, but often scientific, pragmatism that allows them to harness ecological powers with devices ranging from waterwheels to wind turbines. In a number of their works, condiminiums that were once an eyesore on the horizon have been buried to create ‘underground’ dwellings – promoting expansive and bright green spaces at the cost of living underground. Emerging out of this dark underground is a culture driven to appease nature and rebuke obsolescence. In a sense, T&T are refashioning their own potential future in a way that addresses our environmental crisis without letting go of cultural habits born out of urban and suburban modernization. With this in mind, this project is driven as much by ecology as it is formed by modernity.

With an eye for fashion and a taste for irony, T&T insist on a style conscious embrace of ecology and industry. The highly styled characters who inhabit this future appear to have found ‘crafty’ and technical clothing solutions whose hybrid forms evoke medieval knights and Sixties’ hippies as much as they call up the fashion sensibility of the early Russian Avant-Garde. This sampling seems apt in today’s environment where even the Gap has taken up a ‘pre-loved’ aesthetic sensibility and claim to be environmentally responsible simply by looking ethical. As one of the soundtracks for this exhibition suggests, T&T’s work is not only post-apocalyptic, it is “Post-Suzuki” – a statement that not only calls up their ambivalent relationship with a motorcycles and automobile corporation, but also David Suzuki, Canada’s foremost spokesman for the environment.

In Woodcutter (2004), we are presented with a winter landscape where a man is dressed in overalls and a cowboy hat breaking sweat to heat his own cabin partially built from the scrap remains of a car (car-bin?). The ingenuity of the situation is not unlike that of a homeless person in today’s society having to assemble a shelter out of cardboard boxes, shopping carts and the like. What makes T&T’s scenario different is that the woodcutter is presented as a pioneer with a future rather than a ‘homeless’ squatter. The striking similarity between this image and that of Gustave Courbet’s Stonebreakers (1849)) can not go unmentioned. In his 1849 painting Stonebreakers (destroyed during WWII), the self-declared Socialist and Realist Gustave Courbet (1819-1877 ) provoked a great deal of criticism for evoking the cyclical toil and misery of the lower working class in a rural setting. If Courbet’s social type is caught in what Hegel would call bad infinity, T&T’s Woodcutter assumes that he is still going to be around in a post-apocalyptic future. The difference, and what makes T&T’s image so welcoming but uncanny, is that this toil is stripped bare of any negative connotations. Here Courbet’s road worker has been recast as a pioneer with the tools and skills to build his own un-alienated carchitecture. With a nod to Courbet’s Canadian contemporaries’ William Notman (1826-1891) and Cornelius Krieghoff (1815-1872), the dusty road’s of Ornans have been transformed into a Canadian winter scene – transforming Courbet’s socialism into a touristic endorsement of a future where a bit of snow shoveling and creative labour might lead to freedom.

Another recurring architectural form in T&T’s work is the geodesic dome. Composed of the octet truss, the form was first discovered by Alexander Graham Bell and later popularized by the engineer and utopian thinker Buchminster Fuller in the Sixties. Since then, the geodesic structure has entered the popular imagination not only through its use in World Fairs such as Expo 67 in Montreal or EXPO 86 in Vancouver, but also as a common playground structure for children in parks world wide. In the context of art the form calls to mind the Arte Povera of Mario Merz as readily as it echoes the “dissinventions” of the Danish artist collaborative N55. These last references might bode well with T&T as they are all provoked by the living conditions of the squatters and hobos born out of today’s lumpen proletariat. But it is Fuller’s pivotal role in providing a structure in which the concerns of corporate America and the global environment can visually and physically meet that appear to have captured T&T’s imagination most obviously.

Only a month after Michel Foucault delivered his lecture “Des espaces autres” in Paris, Buckminster Fuller realized his first monumental scaled Biosphere for the World Exposition in Montreal as a commission for the US Pavillion. The transparent ‘bubble’ structure revealed ‘Creative America’, a theme that allowed the fair’s 50 million visitors to explore the particular and the universal, the near and the far, hot dogs and space ships. Art such as Andy Warhol’s Self-Portraits hung next to Barnett Newman’s Voice of Fire effectively leveling the high and the low inside Fuller’s sparkling architectural jewel that dominated the fair. Laying claim to the present epoch, this was modernism and post-modernism in an American nut-shell. But as it turned out, this nut-shell, despite its space-age ambition, would soon crack under the pressure of Canadian winters and gradually transform into a leaking and rusty reminder of not only the fair, but the hubris we call progress. In fact, it would not be long before the fairgrounds looked like a romantic ruin from the past rather than the onward future of Star Trek.

The exhibition Onward Future suspends not only doubts about our future but also hopes for a dialectical adventure where dreams do not dry up and pirates still exist to capture our imagination.

Patrik Andersson

Catalogue essay for the exhibition T&T: Onward Future held at Oakville Galleries & Museum London 2008.

T&T are represented by Clint Roenisch Gallery, Toronto and Trapp Editions, Vancouver.

Collaboration (T&T)

The New Paradigm: Models, Diagrams, Proposals and Provisions for...

For locals, False Creek refers to the short inlet that lies at...

Sail boat.

Light house.

Paddle Wheeler.

False Creek raft studies & construction.

False Creek, 2010.

Birdhouse.

Birdhouse for the Boundary Layer, Grande Prairie Alberta.

Architectural shelter study.

Shelter studies, Dana Saskatchewan.

Everything’s Gonna Be OK

T&T project commission for No.9: Contemporary Art & the...

Photo

Stenval, 2009.

2. Hope The creative hobos who inhabit this post-apocalyptic...