URBAN LANDSCAPE
URBAN LANDSCAPE
Thomas Kuijpers, Michele Buda, Annabel Elgar, Daniele Marzorati, Mark Dorf.
Metronom presents the thematic section Urban Landscape, with works by artists Thomas Kuijpers, Michele Buda, Annabel Elgar, Daniele Marzorati and Mark Dorf.
Urban Landscape shows different outcomes of human interference on the natural environment, captured through photography.
Thomas Kuijpers' #goldencrib (2017) and #higestcrib (2017) suggest us that "landscape is shaped by mental attitudes and that a proper understanding of landscapes must rest upon the historical recovery of ideologies" (Baker and Biger, 2006). These two works are part of First Year, a series that ideally shows us what it would be if Donald Trump were an artist instead of the president of the USA. The two buildings, two Trump towers can be read as manifestoes of both his economic policy and style, but also as two portraits of his houses.
Through fiction, manipulation and re-contextualization, Kuijpers redefines what 'truth' is or can be.
Annabel Elgar also deals with the concept of 'truth', its presentation, and the important role played by media in its creations. In Moonrock Kirigami Workshop (2014) and Operation Teapot (2017) photography itself and narration are not at the service of documentation, but at the affirmation of how the search for truth can be ephemeral and subjective. In these works also landscape is treated as an object, as a perspective: the artist offers us only clues, details of a representation that should be looked at and observed as an enigma, in which Elgar plays at the same time the role of the protagonist and the director.
Michele Buda's Tricks and Falls series started in the Jurassic Skatepark in Cesena (Italy), where Buda began to photograph almost incidentally, observing a public park in a provincial town where adults and children meet between banks and walls.
The scenario, the skate park, and its protagonists become features that overshadow the author: the almost obsessive choice of shots and points of view conceal the surrounding landscape and becomes the pillar around which micro photographic stories take place.
Daniele Marzorati and Mark Dorf treat the natural landscape as a base for intervention and manipulation carried out through the camera.
Marzorati's objective is to unveil the symmetry of hidden information between the world and its representation, in this case the world is a Sardinian wood outside all touristic paths. In Emergent 10 and Emergent 14, Mark Dorf plays with the hybridization of categories generally conceived as in opposition: natural/urban, physical/digital. His works therefore unite the landscape - affected, artificial and two-dimensional - with the sculptural and physical approach of his practice: he mixes up connections, throwing light on their reciprocal influences, and potentialities rather than oppositions.
