In the world at present ‘a sense of truth and the real’ seems to be more the reality than reality itself. The real world is under threat it would seem from all angles. The internet has reconfigured community into a format of self definition and concoction in our interactions with online-others. The entertainment industry ‘generates’ super-real environments. The land seems to be undergoing a growing transplantation of genetically modified organisms that have not been known before.
Daniel Arsham’s work at this year’s Armory Art Fair caught my eye. In his mid 20s this artist, based in New York, creates works that explore the effects of nature on the built environment. The new realities these create are novel and futuristic. Where once the built environment was encroaching on the natural world Arsham’s works show a reversal of this with the natural world ‘biting back’. His images play with this by way of nature reclaiming monumental architecture; birds biting nibbles in white walls; humans landing in the ceilings of white cubed rooms; a bow that has been made by drawing the surface of two walls at a corner.
Have we lost reality? Have we lost nature? And in so doing where does wisdom sit? Wisdom in the shape of a large snowy owl, hovering over the desolation and perhaps seeking to return simplicity and reality to what is a world of concocted human ideals.
Arsham’s work will be showing in a solo exhibition, opening at Galerie Emmanuel Perrotin in Paris on 20th March, 2010.
