If you happen to be in the resurgent boomtown of Saskatoon in Saskatchewan, Canada between March 30 and June 10 this year, and have an interest in the intersection of art and urbanism, check out Hatch, Tammy Lu and Crystal Bueckert’s show at the Mendel Art Gallery:
Artists by Artists: Tammy Lu and Crystal Bueckert
Hatch
March 30 to June 10, 2012Hatch is an exhibition of parallel investigations into notions of path finding and city building. Tammy Lu and Crystal Bueckert’s research and drawings address historical and imagined narratives of Saskatoon by tracing and layering events, characters, infrastructures and geography.
Using human and architectural characters of Saskatoon as a narrative code, Lu proposes a process of city planning that involves a continual personal re-configuration of local stories. Bueckert renders collected images into hybrid maps that explore the evolutions and revisions of city building. Employing a non-linear book format, the artists splice their imagined urban spaces to form permutations of possible mapping schemes.
Lu and Bueckert’s collaborative image immediately reminded me of this Sloterdijk passage:
Life is a matter of form–that is the hypothesis we associate with the venerable philosophical and geometrical term “sphere.” It suggests that life, the formation of spheres and thinking are different expressions for the same thing. Referring to a vital spheric geometry is only productive, however, if one concedes the existence of a form of theory that knows more about life than life itself does–and that wherever human life is found, whether nomadic or settled, inhabited orbs appear, wandering or stationary orbs which, in a sense, are rounder than anything that can be drawn with compasses. (pp. 10-11)
Peter Sloterdijk, Spheres. Volume I: Bubbles. Microspherology
