Cumulonimbus Cloud Room 1

Cumulonimbus Clouds: may produce lightning, tornadoes, hailstorms.

Walid Siti
Vasiliki Antonopoulou
Mison Kim
John Ebbert

In this first room, there is a combination of love and ambition, which as we know well, always have the potential for electricity and stormy weather.
The work of Walid Siti focuses on utopia and a vision for the future reaching upward as our constructed structures of the past: ziggurats, pyramids, and towers. These works imply our upward climb, our ambitions, while also our potential to fall, and to fall dramatically. I find a connection between these three works of Siti and the video work of Vasiliki Antonopoulou, Dry, along with the drawings created from the film stills.
In Antonopoulou’s video, architecture appears as metaphor as well- a reference to structures, to things built, even in the tides of waves that bring a rubble along with them, and curl back upon themselves. Dry speaks of the dualities of love, the rocks that move with the waves, the specificity of the naming of things, the rise and decline of experiences, just as Siti’s works depict the fragility of our climb to fame, to future ambitions, to the possibility of admiration and acceptance. In Antonopoulou's drawings the words are camouflaged in the image, an iron red soil is the pencil line that morphs the landscape and words, meaning and metaphor are fused. It becomes difficult to work out the differences, dusty, dry, as if the soil powdered every crevice to fill in the details.
For me, these works are about the same human foibles and successes, the essentials in our human existence. This ambiguity and perhaps, even constrained and deliberate combining of opposites, leads me to consider the works of Mison Kim, whose floor plans are also games; they are points plotted and moving vines of energy, and, resistant as the weeds we see growing through the cement, they apply pressure, dismantling the systems we have built, redefining space and harnessing it all at once. These vines are both fenced in by the pillars of the refined architectural plans, and poised to knock them down, as the flowing tides in Antonopoulou’s work and the fragile ladders and structures in Siti’s works.
John Ebbert's work Cardinal emphasizes a void at its center, a space where a sculpture is reflected through 16 foot ink drawings. The sculpture is us, we stand in the center, imagine it, see it mirrored in the images around us, the cardinal direction lines, the main avenues, which are also walls raised high around us, tall pillars of lines more than twice a human's height. They, too, as the ziggurat referenced in Siti's works, and Hagia Sophia in Kim's works, reference ancient structures, stone circles come to mind, transformed in a neofuturism, the mock up he has created allows us to see them in space and imagine time spent with them.