WITHIN THESE WALLS

Mexico City, January 26 – February 23, 1999

Curated by Paola Morsiani

Artists: Nicola Benizzi, Bruce Busby, Manon Labrecque, Brandon Lattu, Lesley Raeside, Jeremy Sigler, Francesco Simeti

Within These Walls presents the work of seven international artists. Active in disparate media, these artists seem nonetheless to have subsumed architecture both as an essential referent in the conception of their work, and as the catalyst of various concerns paralleling the roles this discipline has historically assumed. These roles include activating a relationship between an interior and an exterior, addressing the outside world and the social sphere, resuming ideas of functionalism and being permeable to surroundings. Architecture is not alluded to by these works for its capacity as an exact science or as synonymous of a cohesive construction. It is instead regarded as a place whose imposed utility and developed individual character have somehow prevailed, with time, over the original clarity of its design. In these artists’ fixation over certain details –pipes, moldings, ceilings, and corners – the architectural space undergoes a reconfiguration. Rather than striving for the idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk, each artist seems to have chosen to work within two disciplines: painting and sculpture are expressed by design, poetry by sculpture, photography by architecture and architecture by photography and video, and video by itself.