"VERTUMNUS" tower was selected and displayed at the curated space: BABEL - Outsider Art Fair, New York (21-24 January 2016)
(3d printed by Voodoo Manufacturing in Brooklyn)
Technology can make us outsiders of us all…lack of technical knowledge can strand us outside of certain platforms of communication, while other technologies can from marginal communities that internalize socially alienated positions.
Babel is an installation of 3d printed imaginary towers assembled from an online open call to a global community of sculptors, visionary artists, architect, engineers, 3d designs and model makers—contemporary, modern, and ancient towers, industrial or religious, fantastical or utilitarian, brutalist or rhotic, from air traffic control towers to bell towers to tower blocks and sky scrapers.
Imaginary cities and surreal structures have long been the domain of many outsides artists including Simon Rodia and Le Factor Coeval. These pieces have been produced to small scale, paralleling the minute, detailed works created by many outsider artists. The final collective piece mirrors the repetition found in many visionary environments, echoing the Chinese
Terracotta Army or Neck Chand’s Rock Garden in Chandigarh, and, at the same time, evokes a multi-authorial work with roots in the Fluxus mail art movement
-Concept text by Leah Gordon (curator)
“Step by step guided on, changeth to blossom and fruit! First from the seed it unravels itself, as soon as the silent
Fruit-bearing womb of the earth kindly allows its escape, And to the charms of the light, the holy, the ever-in-motion,
Peacefully lock'd in itself, 'neath the integument lay, Leaf and root, and bud, still void of colour, and shapeless;
Thus doth the kernel, while dry, cover that motionless life. Upward then strives it to swell, in gentle moisture confiding,
And, from the night where it dwelt, straightway ascendeth to light. Yet still simple remaineth its figure, when first it appeareth;
Piling-up node upon node, ever the primitive form; Yet not ever alike: for the following leaf, as thou seest,” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Metamorphosis of Plants
