Negative Equity: House Projects by Neil Spiller & Nic Clear

  • 15th Apr - 14th May 2016
  • Project Space

 

This exhibition brings together a number of theoretical projects produced by Neil Spiller and Nic Clear focusing on the ‘House’ and its existential, technological and psychological implications within 21st century architectural production. The exhibition re-uses the infrastructure developed as part of the previous ‘Minotaur’ installation as many of the conceptual issues are resonant within these projects. Indeed one of Nic Clear’s works is a House project based on his exhibition design for Minotaur.

 

Neil Spiller

The Longhouse is the spatial and intellectual centre of the Communicating Vessels Island – a project instigated by Spiller in 1998. It is a prytaneion, a place of surreal banquets inhabited by ghosts, dreams, desires and mythic creatures. A Palace of shifting relationships, of momentary flutterings, cartographies and trajectories; where objects have the same accountability as people. It is a place of flame, of heat, of a rotten sun, of dusk and dawn, where the vertical is assimilated into the horizontal and where Modernism breaks down. The vitality of objects has increased a thousand-fold, to the agile architect these disruptive architectural technologies breathe new life into the lexicon of architecture, we can parse architecture differently nowadays, the verbs of architecture are being re-written.

 

Nic Clear

In architectural discourse the house is usually presented as the epitome of bourgeois conviviality, whereas in reality it is often a sight of death, nightmares, brutality and sexual violence. In a series of design projects developed over the last ten years I have been exploring the dys-homely through an engagement with the house and its various occupants. The concepts that animate these projects start with my own dysfunctional relationship with the house I grew up in and animated through Jeff Wall’s essay Dan Graham’s Kammerspiel. The projects engage with a critique of the glass houses of Mies Van Der Rohe, embrace the work of Francis Bacon, J.G. Ballard and Alfred Hitchcock as well as, in the most recent project Minotaur House, develop ideas first considered as part of the Vaughan Oliver exhibition Where Is My Mind?

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