NYAB Event - Daniel Bauer "Cloudcuckooland"

Daniel Bauer "Cloudcuckooland"

Andrea Meislin Gallery

This event has ended.

Cloudcuckooland or Nephelokokkygia is a direct reference to the city conceived and initiated by two dropout Athenian citizens and constructed by birds in Aristophanes' comedy of the same name. Situated in the sky between the terrestrial polis and the Olympian gods, Cloudcuckooland, one of the first utopian constructs, posits a liminal space of critique, escape and resistance, blockading the gods above while threatening to soil the corrupt city of man below.

Like the play, the photographs in the exhibition rely on whimsicality as they drift between what seem to be the confluence of random places and divergent tetrahedric forms caught in front of a wandering lens, redolent of empty signifiers, revolutionary praxis, laden with naïveté, nostalgia and hope.

An epic battle over territory in the art school courtyard between "plop art" and "avantgardening." An unfinished cardboard geodesic model in Mies van der Roheʼs Crown Hall, built by first year architecture students, the night before end of the year critique. An old deteriorating exhibition photograph of a concrete geodesic style synagogue in the IDF officers' training school hangs above an employee stairwell, in the Mies inspired Israel Museum undergoing renovation. On the outskirts of Jerusalem, stands a housing project designed by the same architect as the synagogue, where the ultra-orthodox residents are slowly enveloping the prefabricated concrete geodesic super-structure with cube like balconies and improvised additions. A Buckminster Fuller Dome, once the Winston Churchill Pavilion from the 1964 Worlds Fair, has been converted into an aviary in Corona Park, Queens.

Projections of utopian aspiration, though coddled, compromised and domesticated, still resonate with potentiality, action and imagination.

Daniel Bauer received his BFA from The Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem and his MFA from Columbia University, New York. He teaches in the Photography Department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. This will be his second solo show at the Andrea Meislin Gallery.