Last week I visited Alex Hartley’s ‘The world is still big’ exhibition at the Victoria Miro gallery.
I was drawn by the first line of the synopsis that stated the exhibition:
“is a culmination of his on-going investigation into dystopian architecture, secular habitation and the construction of sanctuary as an inherent drive to form refuge from the world…gone are the idealised Case Study houses, to be replaced with architectural emblems of the counter culture movement, including the iconic Buckminster Fuller geodisic dome. All this in an ever more desperate quest to occupy uninhabited landscapes and wilderness.”
The exhibition filled the two rooms in the main building as well as an installation in the rear courtyard. The two rooms were filled with large photographs which, on closer inspection, have been sculptured with Alex’s interventions. This creats interesting 3D forms on the 2D prints and plays with perspective and scale. The images in themselves are beautiful, presenting various desolate landscapes that have been inhabited, often by isolated and singular buildings.
The most interesting for me was the image of a rocky landscape layered with models of informal buildings. I was interested in the comparison between emergent forms in nature and some unplanned settlements. Like other pieces of the work, it presented interesting juxtapositions of extreme environmental landscapes and habitation.
This point was taken further in the rear courtyard where Alex has built and occupies a geodesic dome, complete with chicken pen and stove, that sits on top of the pound. The dome is a copy of one of the eco domes used by the failed utopian 1960′s commune at Drop City, Colorado.
The images are beautiful and encapsulating, his physical alterations within the pictures emphasising the relationship between natural and built environments and our desire to habitat and vanquish uninhabitable landscapes.
