an exhibition presenting a selection of works reflects on the globe’s relationship with minerals and natural resoures, charting an exploration of the economic, social, and political impact of extraction captialism on humanity and the environment.

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Concept
In an obscure article titled “The Crystal Land” published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1966 the American artist Robert Smithson captivatingly recollects a daytrip he and his wife the artist Nancy Holt took with Donald Judd and his wife the dancer Julie Finch from Manhattan to the quarries of New Jersey. Smithson recalled the abundance of minerals they discovered, from axinite and copper to dolomite, pyrite, and silver. In the article he reflects upon the pervasive presence of materials in everyday modern life made of minerals: plate-glass storefront windows, reflective automobile chrome surfaces, a rearview mirror, and even the crystals in radio technology transmitting the music in his car as it speeds down the New Jersey highway. In the short, poetic essay, Smithson captures an exhilarating moment in modernism and its technological application of the very same minerals found in the rich geological terrain that the foursome had visited on that warm spring day in 1966 collecting crystals and rocks from a New Jersey landscape.

Fast-forward to 2025: the world is fully occupied and reliant on extraction capitalism and the application of other kinds of minerals used in other kinds of modern-day media and communication technologies, that of the digital, the Internet, the screen—the realities of contemporary life. The Crystal Land would examine the use of minerals—specifically what is referred to today as “rare earth” resources—and their application primarily in what can be summarized as screen technologies. The exhibition and accompanying programs would contribute to the discourse on dwindling natural resources—from water and botanicals to oil and gas—resulting from human intervention. The exhibition would provide a means to reflect on the omnipresent use of screen technologies and their impact, not only on social connectivity and alienation, but the earth’s geography and, thus, global politics. Conflicts occur when something becomes rare or extinct, when supplies become low. Competing economic and political forces follow in order to sort out who has rights to mineral-rich regions of the world.

The Crystal Land would present a selection of works reflecting on the globe’s relationship with minerals and natural resoures, charting an exploration of the economic, social, and political impact of extraction captialism on humanity and the environment.

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Concept
Whether consuming coffee, playing records, reading books, sipping tea, sharing Thai, baking pizza or even worshipping, the museum experience has expanded over the past thirty years into a multiplicity of activities.

One could mark the beginning with museum seating—that basic form used to accommodate visitors’ expectations for a seat to contemplate the object before them. Today, the encounter with something beyond the object is fueled by artists who combine art, design and occasionally social assembly to prompt new ways of being together in the museum arena, at times exchanging the gallery aesthetic for retail and hospitality where consuming and relaxing offer expanded aesthetic engagements with art and ideas. 

With the underlying emphasis on the role of the human body in a museum space and in relation to the supporting infrastructures, #museumseating would depart from the concept of museum seating to trace a history of artists’ use of design and social convening that radically transformed the public sphere from a space to see an art object to an expansive new museum arena, today accommodating a range of cultural experiences related to and departing from the field of art.  

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Concept
Countless factors impact the look and feel—the characteristics—of an unforgettable dance scene: location, lighting, sound, scale, privacy, access, fashion, communication, city laws, the crowd, and of course—the music.

All these things can swirl and coalesce into something unexpected and magical that sustain a dance scene for years, even decades. They are what one might call the “architecture of dance”—the expansive social and physical infrastructures that hold and nurture a form of human connectivity like none other. As dance scenes past and present across the globe attest, the structures can forge something legendary from New York City’s Studio 54 and Paradise Garage, to Manchester’s Haçienda, London’s Fabric, Tokyo’s Womb, Ibiza’s Amnesia, Singapore’s Zouk, Paris’s Rex Club, and—Berlin’s Berghain.

The enveloping social and physical architecture of these scenes naturally shifts over time. Things change. With the undeniable ubiquity of social media for bringing together people combined with the rapidly transforming social and economic conditions of cities, the quality and quantity of dance scenes also change. While some indicators like the omnipresence of social media and the scarcity of cheap rents in urban centers may point to dance becoming an endangered species, others prove quite the opposite.

Dance, dance I said! would examine dance as a necessary, even urgent, social form for coming together. The exhibition and accompanying program would use the architecture of dance as an anthropological tool, a lens through which to explore the many nuanced and often complicated social, technological, and economic factors in urban centers worldwide that either keep alive or endanger one of the most age-old modes of palpable human connectivity—dance.

Possible Film Program
Phil Collins, Tomorrow Is Always Too Long (2014)

Jeffrey Hinton, Hydraulic Disco (2014)

Alek Keshishian, Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991) 

Jennie Livingston, Paris Is Burning (1990)

Wu Tsang, Wilderness (2012)

Michael Winterbottom, 24 Hour Party People (2002)
  

an exhibition refering to Dürer’s famed engraving explores artists’ enduring interests in geometric forms and the language of abstraction, dispensing with the pursuit of perfection in exchange for beautifully unrealizable concepts and relentless experimenation.

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Concept
The famed German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer made an engraving called Melancholia I around 1514. Dürer’s scene is puzzling, and it has captured the attention of artists across the ages. It shows the winged personification of Melancholy, one of the four humors, crestfallen with her head resting wearily on her hand. She fiddles with a caliper, a device used to measure linear dimensions of objects, and is seated among other tools associated with geometry, once widely known as one of the seven liberal arts fundamental to artistic creation. Melancholy, there she is, Dürer’s stand in for the beleaguered artist figure, beset with immeasurable imagination and ungovernable ingenuity in a world where artistic perfection measured using the tools of reason.

Today’s relentless strive toward perfection where ideas scrutinized and analyzed for every possible outcome has eroded the pursuit of ambitious, visionary and beautifully unrealizable concepts. Our weary world—it shows signs of fatigue, with originality looking comparably dejected as Dürer’s figure of Melancholy.

Today’s Melancholia is an exhibition that would refer to Dürer’s enigmatic engraving to explore artists’ enduring interest in geometric forms where the  language of mathematics and geometry sit alongside the crystalizing structures of polygons, octahedrons, and dodecahedrons valuing above all  innovation, chance, and uncertainty.
   

an exhibition about the social and infrastructural characteristics of play, and the innate human need for unscripted interactions with each other in the physcial realm. 

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Concept
Play is essential to humanity. It builds community. It forges bonds and fosters creativity. It innovates. Play is freedom, whereas unscripted interactions with each other and our surroundings—without a purpose in the world—has been the underlying force of human development for centuries. Yet, in a contemporary culture beset with technologies that assign product, content, and goal to each activity, decision, and interaction of daily life—where is play? Where are the pleasures of improvisation and the joys of uncertainty, the value of chance and potency of spontaneity? Where are unscripted moments that offer the indulgences of simply being in common?

Unleased: Play and Its Discontents takes us on a journey from the 1920s to present with works by artists that prioritize the social and infrastructural characteristics of play in the physical realm. The exhibition dispenses with the algorithmic technologies of the screen and the scripted contests of games, leaving behind these discontents in exchange for looking at the innate need for humans to be together, unleased in unstructured irrational, and illogical situations—to play.