dis-assembling utopias
20 July 20 - 6 August 2016
Opening reception: Saturday 23 July 12:00
Walkabout by the artist: Tuesday 26 July 13:00
GUS will present 'dis-assembling utopias', a solo exhibition by Kendall Buster, sculptor and Professor in the Department of Sculpture and Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, United States.
Buster is fascinated by the ways in which architectural structures embrace, contain, shelter, and frame the individuals who inhabit them. Her previous studies in microbiology and interest in the power dynamics of architectural spaces, have resulted in works informed by buildings both real and visionary, and by biological morphologies.
The GUS main gallery installation, Model City (Constraint) is of central importance to the exhibition. Constructed out of cardboard and paper, the work suggests a model city of brute forms, referencing both geometric abstraction and modernist architecture. This configuration of models is part of an ongoing project call Model City; an ever-growing inventory of architectural phenotypes by way of simple planar constructions. Something sinister is revealed in the cool language of these angled models suggesting observation towers, enclosures without exits, windows for hidden eyes and coliseum-style pits. Their fortress-like construction speaks of how enclosures offer at once protection and entrapment. They directly reference the ways in which architecture can frame or control and how the dynamics of looking and being looked at reflect the power relationship inherent in all architectural spaces.
The exhibition will also include graphite drawings on drafting film and mural size digital collage prints made from scanned fragments of images from National Geographic magazines printed between 1960 and 1980. Buster is also interested in the language and ideologies expressed in architecture and will present in the exhibition new collage works created during her residency here in the region and informed by her research of South African architecture of the 1960's and 70's.
BIOGRAPHY
Before pursuing an education in art, Kendall Buster studied microbiology receiving a BS degree in Medical Technology. She then earned a BFA degree from the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington DC and an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University in addition to participating in the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Studio Program in New York City. Her work has been exhibited in numerous venues nationally and internationally. These include The Hirshhorn Museum and the Kreeger Museum in Washington, DC, Artist's Space and The American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City, The Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh, The Haggerty Museum in Milwaukee, Suyama Space in Seattle, SCAD Museum in Savannah, and the Bahnhof Westend in Berlin. Commissioned projects include permanent site-responsive works for the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Frick Chemistry Building at Princeton University, and Johns Hopkins University.
Kendall Buster's website: http://www.kendallbuster.com/
The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalogue. In addition to extensive documentation of the work it will include a text by Dr. Ronald Bogue, Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Georgia, whose areas of interest include literary theory and the comparative study of the arts. Dr. Bogue has written extensively on the work of Deleuze and Guattari.
