'Future Tropes' at Volume Gallery

'Future Tropes' at Volume Gallery

Portraying objects that are intuitive and challenge our notions of the domestic

Chicago

Volume Gallery is pleased to announce FUTURE TROPES opening Friday, September 5th 2014.

Let it be a magnet, the snowy core of an avalanche! – Bruno Taut

Tanya Aguiñiga, Jonathan Muecke, Jonathan Olivares, Leon Ransmeier, RO/LU, and Anders Ruhwald take part in FUTURE TROPES, an exhibition as much about now, as it is about the past and the future. The exhibition was founded on the principles of the Crystal Chain, a utopian correspondence initiated by Bruno Taut in 1919-1920, in which a small group of like-minded architects and artists exchanged ideas on what form the architecture of the future should take. This spirit is echoed in FUTURE TROPES with the designers utilizing contemporary methods of communication (email, dropbox, etc) to exchange ideas and images that inform the concepts and works in the exhibition.

With the philosophy of the Crystal Chain in mind, and instead of focusing on typical contemporary methodologies or materials per se, the designers were encouraged to go in a different direction, focusing on creating something simultaneously new and timeless. Reflecting on ideas or forms that never change, regardless of time or location, and concepts and designs with similarities that are shared amongst ideas of ‘the future’ equally with domestic objects from archeological excavations.

The nature of ‘timelessness’ is something enigmatic and untangeable – as defined, “Independent of time; eternal, ageless”. Furthermore, “a state of eternal existance believed in some religions to characterize the afterlife”. There are typologies that persist throughout all of these periods and regions – basic human needs that permeate our subconscious to the point that they are often overlooked and considered benign or vernacular.

The works in FUTURE TROPES represent a range of typologies that exhibit this notion of timelessness. Portraying objects that are intuitive and challenge our notions of the domestic;

... the work should be slightly ahead of the world, slightly uncontemporary, setting the stage for future codes and operating in a place that precedes our ability to apply language to those codes... the relevance does not lie in reproducing existing values or rejecting them, but in performing them differently, speaking in a new key, using a different mode of address. A careful balance between ethics and style, humor and play, knowledge and nonknowledge... truth in a new key. – Jan Verwoert adjusted by RO/LU.