Michael Ashkin: Architecture and Utopia
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Bio:
Michael Ashkin is an artist working in sculpture and photography. His work has been shown at the 1997 Whitney Biennial, Greater New York, Documenta 11, Vienna Secession, MUDAM in Luxembourg, and Kolumba in Köln. Ashkin has published four photobooks: Garden State (Workroom G in 2000), Long Branch (A-Jump Books in 2014), Horizont (TIS Books in 2018), and were it not for (Fw:Books in 2019). He has been awarded two Pollock-Krasner Fellowships (1997, 2012) and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2009). He has taught at Cornell University since 2006.
Abstract:
Manfredo Tafuri provides insights into how architectural, artistic, technical, or intellectual objects are the product of subterranean and barely acknowledged utopian ideologies. Best intentions notwithstanding, no single object can elude the social and material formations of history. And it is from the repression of history, or at least the failure to comprehend its scope, that emerges the confusing mass of forces that haunt our world.
This exhibition includes photographs taken in the New Jersey Meadowlands in the months before 9/11, photographs of Ithaca during the lockdown, photographs taken from a public bus between Mt. Vesuvius and modern-day Pompeii, and photographs taken from a minivan through the Middle Atlas Mountains of Morocco.
Special Event: Meet the artist in the gallery on Wednesday, February 15, from 5–7 p.m.
