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Spider’s Web Forest is a large-scale solo exhibition that continues her serial reflection over the Anthropocene era. Based on the experience of living in a modern urbanized space, Gart reflects not only on the theme of environmental pollution, but also on the fact that the city is composed of a priori inanimate matter: plastic, metal, wires, etc.
The resignation to the pollution of urban spaces, their littering (clogging) and abandonment becomes the reason for Gart to turn to the ideas of dark ecology, in the context of which she reflects on the synthesis of the living and non-living, the natural and the artificial. Today this is one of the most relevant trends in philosophy and art, associating with a reassessment of the relationship between mankind and nature. The author of the term, British philosopher Timothy Morton, sees the problem as the fact that today's mass environmental agenda represents the natural world as a stable phenomenon with its own laws and rules that are accessible to humanity for understanding. Doubting such an anthropocentric position, dark ecology begins with a desire to make nature truly ‘weird' and ‘wild'.
As a result, Gart's work immerses the viewer in a ruined, abandoned and desolate space. It is not so gloomy, as a mysterious and mystical place. A post-apocalyptic landscape in which the process of synthesizing the industrial and the natural generates a completely new world, where the abandoned city becomes a living organism in its own right.
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In her projects, the artist proposes to change the anthropocentric view to a post anthropocentric one, where the boundaries between the human and non-human are blurred. The world of objects is self-sufficient. It is organic, it aspires to be alive, and it turns out that it no longer needs man at all. Rather, it hinders it. In Gart's imagination, the city becomes the forest and the forest becomes the city. And as a result of this synthesis, a new living organism appears, a ruined, abandoned and desolate space, no longer a city or a forest.
It consists of extremely materialized abstract forms: vertical dark lines - poles of rusted metal covered with liquid black rubber; white circles - boxes with artificial light and electricity, which flows through their wires like blood through veins; a broad black stripe - parchment, which means oil. But at the same time, these artificial forms refer to phenomena from the natural world: poles to trees, circles to the sun and the moon, a broad black stripe to the earth and the skyline. The process of recognition immerses the viewer in a pastoral landscape in the style of industrial noir. And yet the darkness of noir is precisely the state in which dark philosophy remains, or should remain.
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Spider's Web Forest: Alexandra Gart
Past viewing_room