Small Museum for the American Metaphor

REDCAT gallery curator Ruth Estévez invited the Belgian architect Kersten Geers to develop the exhibition, which focuses on themes that are clearly evident in the architectural work he creates with his firm, OFFICE Kersten Geers and David Van Severen. The visual argument in this exhibition is that there is a certain architectonic idea that dwells on the celebration of Endlessness as mythicized in the American West. The metaphor is the base for an architecture that blurs the distinction between building and object, collapsing the different scales. It is an architecture that celebrates the fiction of the wide open and seeks to re-evaluate/reinterpret the world as a gigantic interior. In that context, a successful intervention is able to define hierarchies, carve out places, and make shared points of reference. The exhibition, much in the tradition of showcasing objects in a defined space, such as a cabinet, collects artworks, architectural models, drawings and other elements that consciously fade the distinction between object and representation.

The exhibition features works from artists, designers and architects including John Baldessari, Baukuh, Koenraad Dedobbeleer, Stefano Graziani, JOHNSTONMARKLEE, Rita McBride, Jonathan Muecke, Jonathan Olivares, Manfred Pernice, OFFICE KGDVS, Bas Princen, Ettore Sottsass, Saul Steinberg, Harald Thys & Jos de Gruyter, Richard Venlet, Christopher Williams, Ed Ruscha, Michaël Van den Abeele, Peter Wächtler, two new commissioned installations by Pieter Vermeersch and Valerie Mannaerts, as well as models of past and present architectures of the "big box."