NYAB Event - Thomas Lail "The World We Have Lost"

Thomas Lail "The World We Have Lost"

Masters & Pelavin

This event has ended.

In his new exhibition, titled after the pathbreaking and highly-popular publication of Peter Laslett, Lail continues to examine history and political thought through a series of works centered on Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Map—a projection of a world map onto the surface of a polyhedron. Fuller intended the map to be unfolded indifferent ways to emphasize different aspects of the world. Peeling the triangular faces of the icosahedron apart in one way results in an icosahedral net that shows an almost contiguous land mass comprising all of earth's continents – not groups of continents divided by oceans. Peeling the solid apart in a different way presents a view of the world dominated by connected oceans surrounded by land.

Variations of Fuller's Dymaxion Map are directly depicted in each of Lail’s xerography paintings and works on paper, which are created from fragments of distorted reproductions of communes, "drop cities," High Modernist housing projects, Goya's "Disasters of War" and Courbet's "Burial at Ornans." From afar, this work achieves Fuller's goal of showing “a precise means for seeing the world from the dynamic, cosmic and comprehensive viewpoint.” However, upon closer examination, figures found within the assembled imagery begin to develop relationships and interactions reminiscent of The Soviet writer Ivan Efremov’s utopia, “Andromeda” (1957), in which a united humanity communicates with a galaxy-wide Great Circle in order to develop its culture within a single social framework. By also presenting cast concrete representations of the Dymaxion Map’s triangle edges, withinthe physical space, Lail allows viewers to enter in to the Great Circle with his subjects