Opening Thursday 18th of August at 1 p.m.
Welcome to the opening of two exhibitions with our guest artists for July and August, Christopher Squier and Shanta Rao in collaboration with David Cousinard.
Christopher Squier
Flattened and disorderly
The interdisciplinary artist Christopher Squier often reassembles broken and fragmented materials into sculptural and digital forms. Extracted from historical sites, ruins and religious iconography, these visual elements are restaged within new situations through processes like satellite imaging, animation, Photoshop and isolation of elements. In his exhibition at Babel he includes three-dimensional renderings showing variations on the Fresnel lenses found in lighthouses. These make up a fictional archive of optical forms, which remix historical tools of vision with histories of photography and surveillance.
Christopher Squier (b. 1991 in Lawrence, Kansas) is an artist based in San Francisco. He recently graduated with an MFA in Sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute (2015). Using dark humor and combining images of luxury and violence, his projects reference crime scenes, horror movies, and architectural rubble. His work has been shown in Boston, Córdoba, Prague and San Francisco, and is in the collection of the Prague Gallery of Czech Glass. christophersquier.com
Shanta Rao & David Cousinard
A Straight Line to the touch is worth a Circle to the sight
As an ongoing project multidisciplinary artist Shanta Rao has found inspiration in the mythic sci-fi novel Flatland by the author Edwin A. Abbott. Welcoming the metaphoric multi-entries of the book and the idea of alterity, she extends her individual art practice to collaborative projects wherein the philosophical literary fantasy becomes a territory of experimentation.
The project presented in Babel is the result of collaboration with the French artist David Cousinard using a Flatland proverb – A Straight Line to the touch is worth a Circle to the sight -as a starting point of an artistic dialogue. Through different techniques, the exhibition explores the flows between the no-scale world of geometric abstraction and his possible coalescence with the “solid world” evoked in the book.
babelkunst.no 