Current Exhibition:
Keith WilsonCollapse
May 5th, 2012 to June 30th, 2012
Opening Reception: Saturday May 5th, 2012, 4 to 8 p.m.
Hours: Sundays 1 to 4 p.m. or by appointment
Martina }{ Johnston is excited to present Collapse, an exhibition featuring photographs, video, and installation work by Bay Area artist Keith Wilson. Wilson will be presenting two bodies of work, the Hyde Park Apartments and Collapse series, in which the artist presents observations about the absurdity that emerges when we try to realize our desires through the creation of a built landscape. Please join us for an opening reception on Saturday, May 5th from 4 to 8p.m.
Keith Wilson, “Lot 77, Freeman's Crossing,” 2012.
We are happy to announce that this opening will also double as a release party for Keith Wilson’s book, Hyde Park Apartments, published by Publication Studio Berkeley & Allone Co. Editions (link includes excerpt of book).
Keith offers us some context for his work:
"My impulse to document the natural and built environment was born, like myself, in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia. My childhood world was a cookie-cutter subdivision called Misty Valley Estates. At some point I realized my family didn’t live on an estate, that our house wasn’t situated between mountains and that mist rarely filled our cul-de-sac. Once attuned to this fact I began to take note of the nomenclature and the architectural vernacular used by developers and real-estate agents to evoke the pastoral, the historic, the ideal."
"As an adult, I am simultaneously fascinated and repulsed by the suburbs. My emotional, psychic and familial ties butt heads with my ecological, cultural and aesthetic views. I’ve found that the best way to convey both the tragedy and humor of this conflicted orientation is by presenting my observations in a straightforward and unsentimental manner."
Keith Wilson, “Lot 53, Silver Oak,” 2012.
COLLAPSE
"The recent recession hit Suburban Atlanta particularly hard. In 2006, approximately 100,000 people relocated to metropolitan Atlanta in search of good weather, plentiful jobs and ample, affordable housing. In 2009, that number dropped over 80% to 17,000. One result of the severe downturn is a half-built, desolate suburban landscape stuck in limbo."
"Collapse is an on-going, cross format project documenting and investigating the recession's effects on Atlanta’s exurban fringe, a shadowy penumbral zone Robert Smithson may have called 'the gap,' a blank and void region we never look at. This abandoned 'site' occupies an intriguing position in the American landscape. It isn't the city or the country. It isn't built or pristine. It isn't a venerated, romantic ruin worthy of tour buses (such as Pompeii or Gettysburg), nor a model for future development. It's a site on pause. And while the human-housing market attempts to find equilibrium, natural forces (trees, weeds, erosion, rodents) continue to go about their age-old business."
"The project has three components: a photography series, a short looped video and a site-specific outdoor installation."
"The photographs present a series of protruding pipes in the desolate landscape of half-built housing developments. Originally intended to supply homeowners with basic utilities (water, electricity, gas, sewage), the pipes now appear to be skyward growing totems, watching over the land as it slowly returns to the forest it once was."
"The video, The Sound of a Collapse, is a short video about the end of an American frontier. Shot in the Atlanta exurb of Lawrenceville, the piece uses sound and image to present, quite literally, where the ideal ends and where reality begins."
"The site specific installation, located in a vacant lot across from the gallery, will feature a series of protruding pipes similar to the ones found in the project’s photography series. They too will act as totems of the overgrown plot as it attempts to become the Berkeley Farms pasture it once was."
Keith Wilson, “VIP,” 2011.
HYDE PARK APARTMENTS
"Hyde Park Apartments is a visual taxonomy of an Austin, Texas neighborhood and its various apartment complexes. Flat-footed, everyday photographs of slightly run down stucco and brick structures are paired with fanciful titles such as 'V.I.P,' 'El Dorado' and 'The Jacksonian.' Inspired by Ed Ruscha, Lewis Baltz, and Bernt and Hilla Becher, the series records ongoing attempts to evoke the ideal through aggrandized nomenclatures."
"It took me several months living in the Hyde Park neighborhood before I noticed what the Bechers might describe as a typology: a high percentage of the apartment structures, built mostly in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, were named, and those names were advertised on their facades. Most people, myself included, drove, walked, biked, texted or iPhoned by them without noticing. Then... in walked Ed Ruscha whose early photography books encouraged me to document these structures in unsentimental and serial form. This body of work is by no means high on the originality scale, rather, it continues a conversation that Ruscha began in Los Angeles decades ago. I’m using his strategy to document a beautifully banal architectural phenomenon in a much less (until recently) mythologized location."
"People don’t want to just live in an apartment, but in a villa. They don’t want a parking lot but an arbor. They want to do more than pay rent, they aspire to a lifestyle. I’m fascinated by the degree to which these naming display efforts are successful (or not!). In some cases the name, the font, the façade, and the architecture coalesce into a 'living experience': The Beehive, The Monticello. In others, nothing works: Bent Tree, The Del Prado."
Keith Wilson, “Su Casa,” 2011.
"The book Hyde Park Apartments presents 47 apartment diptychs. The apartment names (on the left side) extracted from their context (on the right side) emphasizes the disconnect between the advertised and the actual. When closed the two come together. Whether it’s a kiss or a collision is a matter of opinion."
Special thanks to Colter Jacobsen and his Allone Co. Editions for making the book possible.
