Goshka Macuga creates installations that question the role of the curator, the artist, and the collector. As an artist who often hosts the work of other artists within her own environments, Macuga probes the conventional methods of displaying art, the boundaries of authorship, the protocols of lending, networks of personal relationships and the demands of ownership.
For The Straight or Crooked Way, Macuga has selected paintings, maquettes and models by artists and architects to recreate the soaring landscape depicted in J.M. Gandy’s Architectural visions of early fancy, in the gay morning of youth, and dreams in the evening of life (1820). This watercolour – housed in Sir John Soane’s Museum picture gallery – depicts a utopian landscape in which Soane’s monumental, unrealised building projects sit. Macuga’s three-dimensional homage to the nineteenth-century architect plays with the gaps between ambition, design and realisation, and continues her research into and fascination with Soane’s melancholy vision.
The installation can be viewed on several scales: the visitor can survey the models as a total vista, or around the sea of plinths to inspect the intricate works individually; in doing so the ‘behind the scenes’ roughness of the plinths or the scrutable craftsmanship of the model-making opens up a further layer of investigation.
Further information:
http://www.gasworks.org.uk/shows/gos_mac/