Last week we looked at two exhibitions that more or less dealt with the notion of “home.” In both instances, this was also inflected with the spectre of ruination. One did so in an overtly theatrical manner involving a lot of “meta-modernist” pastiche and “archaeological” stylization while the other concocted a self-destructive narrative of “displacement” that testified to the distance between art and the subjective fantasy of home. The notion of housing has also been cropping up a bit lately at Skol. They have had two group shows in the past few months dealing directly with it in a variety of guises lately. The currently on view Catalogue des ruines in certain respects was a logical follow-up to Mode d’emploi pour habitation invisible (User’s Manual for an Invisible Home) . If the latter relied on the idea of human structures as a basic model, the former relies on the notion of the world remade around the human in a far more extreme way. The exhibition’s text describes it thi
For several years, Centre Clark has started spring with the latest edition of their Maison modèle show, which employs their space as if it were a model home. The curators of the year select what the model is and decorate and furnish it with sculptures and other artworks. This fundraising event is usually one of the most elaborate installations of the year for the centre. In this year’s iteration, curators Carolyne Scenna and Jean-Michel Leclerc claim that they wished to reflect on the idea of ruin as a space charged with an equivocal temporality, straddling questions of impermanence and vestige, but also on the notion of work — of reconstruction, transformation, memory, repair — that partial or complete destruction, whether material or not, implies. [p] Maison modèle VI is thus interested in bringing together practices that address these themes in an open-ended way, and by extension, the exhibition evokes the sensation we feel when faced with objects that bear witness to the passi