"New Work - James Angus "
2000-10-14 until 2000-11-12
Australian Centre for Contemporary Art
South Yarra, VI, AU

Remember when you pulled a face as a child and you were told if the wind blew it'd stay that way forever. London-based Australian artist James Angus presents his latest sculpture in a similar manner. Utilising computer based software, various design objects (a teapot, a basketball) and architectural models (Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building or the Bavarian King Ludwig's castle) have been subject to extreme hypothetical forces.

The Seagram Building has been bent like a banana, perhaps in high cyclonic winds, and the basketball appears squashed as the result of a fall from 25,000 feet. The castle has been superimposed upon itself in a kind of doppelganger effect; double the towers, twice as many turrets.

Thus technology enables a high-pressure or calamitous moment for design to be envisaged, even rendered on the computer. The results become blueprints for the redesign and construction of new objects by Angus out of various materials. The moment of the basketball's impact with the ground is set in bronze while the Seagram building is constructed out of lightweight timber. The objects comprise a strange, changed world affected by all sorts of forces and shifts.

IMAGE:
James Angus
Seagram Building, 2000

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