SUPERLITH – Miles Gertler at Corkin Gallery

Superlith – Miles Gertler at Corkin Gallery

Miles Gertler’s upcoming show titled Superlith will be opening January 28th 2015 at the Corkin Gallery, in Toronto. Gertler is a recent (2013) graduate of the University of Waterloo School of Architecture’s BAS programme. Below is a description of the show, courtesy of Miles Gertler and the Corkin Gallery.

The Corkin Gallery is located in Toronto’s historic Distillery District, and is an award winning architectural heritage and adaptive reuse project by Shim Sutcliffe, completed in 2004.

The show will be ongoing for a five week period, and is certainly worth a visit. Please see link for the Corkin Gallery website.

Gallerist: Jane Corkin
Exhibitions Director: Nicole Schembre
Installation: Chris Hessian, Ian Robson, Carol Kaifosh
External Fabrication: Carol Kaifosh

Superlith

Miles Gertler

Through a set of architectural studies in typology and program, Miles Gertler articulates a spatially and temporally indeterminate revisionist history in Superlith. Combining five related series of works into this exhibition, these images form a fragmentary archive that approximates the subject territory’s political context, customs, and crises. Using narrative as an alibi for an autonomous investigation into architectural typology, the work can be understood in two categories: those aspects that convey narrative material, and those that deal in the tectonic. The total work is speculative fiction.

The Superlith Series introduces monolithic structures into scenes sampled from colonial postcards and photos of the past century. The latent potential of each site is tapped into with a charged, architectural counterpart. They are alien yet integrated with their contexts. Supralith is a spatial installation that delaminates the photographic layers of the Superlith Series into three dimensions. The object monolith rests at the centre of the space, resonating with a low sonic hum, produced from within the figure’s core. Its cantilevered slabs are populated by architecturally heterogeneous figures that cast an implicit gaze over the vacant desert landscape that lines the enclosing space in which the sculpture sits. Supralith is an interrogation into notions of heterotopia and the other through the counter-positioning of the specific and the indeterminate. Supralith, 62”x48”x48”, Wood, Plaster, Paint, Casting Resin, Pigment, Wheat-Paste, Paper, Gypsum.

The Seven Series is a visual account that re-imagines the ancient Seven Wonders in typological terms. Their re-figuration contests the historical record with radical tectonic experiments. Each one is an exercise in the materialization of an architectural program. What shapes might a Mausoleum, Temple, and Hanging Gardens take? How best to deliver on the promise—the function, performance, and image—suggested in their names?

New Order captures early moments of state building, before structures are occupied with the offices, agents, and institutions of the client regime. Following the practice of photo collage established with The Superlith and Seven Series, New Order intervenes in the vacant landscapes of colonial photography and Western nineteenth-century landscape painting (for instance New Order 01, after Ivan Shiskin). The frontal format flattens the picture into an architectural document—the elevation—that renders the construct as orthographic drawing.

Scenario City is an archive of archetypal parts. Scale and materiality are compromised, inverted, and confused to re-figure the relative magnitudes between elements.

Walls (Untitled Study 01, Untitled Study 01 Zoom) is a series of large scale surface installations that interrogate the material ethic of the four preceding series.

Gertler is a co-founder of Toronto’s Studio 93H and will complete his graduate degree in architecture at Princeton University in 2016. His architectural practice, Common Accounts, is currently exploring architecture’s relationship with the material business of death in the city and is in design development of its first built project in Ontario. Gertler’s work has been presented at Art Toronto; Design at Riverside Gallery (Cambridge); and in Actar’s Bracket 3.0: At Extremes. Gertler was selected as one of Artsy’s Ten Canadian Artists on the Rise at Art Toronto, 2016.