In fall of 2010, the IHC launched a new project: the PLATFORM Gallery Space, founded and curated by IHC Senior Artist Alejandro Casazi in cooperation with associate curators Laura Devendorf and Yumi Kinoshita. Originating from the French word plateforme, meaning ‘ground plan’ or ‘flat shape’, the PLATFORM exhibition space is designed to bolster the careers of young international artists through the submission and display of two-dimensional printed media and video art. Artists from ten countries have responded to the project’s calls for submissions by submitting electronic versions of their work. Works chosen by the curators are printed or projected for display in the halls of the sixth floor of the HSSB; this process eliminates the need to ship physical art objects, creating an opportunity for artists to participate regardless of their location, income or nationality. This year, the Gallery has displayed the work of 41 artists over the course of three shows:
SNARLED MEGALOPOLIS:
Visions of the Emerging Face of Megacities
October 7 – December 17 / 2010
This exhibition collects artists’ visualizations of vertiginously growing megacities, with their impulsive structures and grids. Featuring the work of fourteen individual artists from around the world, Snarled Megalopolis will explore a wide range of urban configurations — slum, favela, comuna, barrio de invación, taudis, shantytown.
This exhibition gathers art pieces based on unplanned urban growth of different megacities, showing how these spaces reflect and shape local political, cultural, and religious practices, and focusing on the common configuration of the urban grid.Introduction by:
BRIAN JONES, PhD Candidate
Department of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara
SUBURBIA
January 3 – May 31 /2011
Where Platform’s last exhibition, Snarled Megalopolis, visualized the organic shapes generated by cities out of control, Suburbia will highlight landscapes and architectures characterized by regulation, uniformity, and standardization. These landscapes are visions of nostalgia, constructed as rings around cities, bridges between cities, islands that echo cities, or pockets inside cities. These spaces long for a return to a bucolic paradise, yet are trapped in a frenetic geometrization that moves inexorably towards a sterilized utopia. As an international show, Suburbia will present a global perspective on the way repetitive and planned landscapes are interpreted and formed in other cultures, creating a multicultural rendering of both the motivations to form these spaces and the psychologies that suburbs generate. The IHC’s Platform Gallery features a curated collection of prints and video from an international body of artists.
MICRO-TOPOLOGIES
June 1 – September 15
Where Platform’s previous shows Snarled Megalopolis and Suburbia explored geographies of large cities and suburbs, Micro-Topologies investigates the complexities of human-land relationships and natural-human phenomena envisioned in “local” contexts. The exhibit features artworks that reveal, examine and (re)interpret activities, environments, movements and communities on a small scale. It focuses on specific sites, interpreting “micro” as literally microscopic or hyper-local.