The end of utopia

American artists Jacob Hashimoto and Emil Lukas have been invited by Studio la Città Gallery to stage a site-specific show in Palazzo Flangini reflecting on “The End of Utopia”. Decades of environmental exploitation have left us perilously balanced and wavering on every side: political, social, economic, natural, technological, and ecological. As many observers of the Anthropocene have noted with apt unease, humanity itself has increasingly become the perpetrator, rather than victim, of planetary chaos.

  In the midst of these conditions, Hashimoto and Lukas’s work addresses a question of newfound relevance: if art is arguably the interpolation of manmade schema onto nature – humankind’s order upon primordial chaos – then how does art’s meaning mutate, as we realize that the infrastructures, systems, and algorithms all originally designed by humans to bring utopia within reach, are in fact dooming its very viability?

Upon entering Palazzo Flangini’s seventeenth-century ground-floor space, visitors encounter an immense, floating, site-specific sculpture by Jacob Hashimoto, comprising 8500 black bamboo-and-paper kites suspended from the ceiling and assembled into a spectacular, roiling cloud that crests overhead. Emil Lukas’s work occupies the first-floor of the space. Lukas has created three separate, but interwoven, groups of work: “Lens,” “Puddles,” and “Threads.” At one end of the vast gallery, 650 aluminium pipes are assembled into a giant lens of sorts. Through its side-by-side tubes, the concave, almost iridescent sculpture affords a vista that moves with the viewer according to his or her position. From the right angle, the lens focuses and isolates the viewer, distilling the experience of the artwork to a single, fundamental perspective – the watchman’s post in the Panopticon.  

12 May – 30 July 2017
The End of Utopia
Palazzo Flangini
Cannaregio 252, Venice