The Or Gallery is pleased to present Creative Destruction, an exhibition by New York-based artist Matthew Buckingham. Central to the exhibition is a new video installation work titled Where Will We Live? produced at the Or Gallery in July of this year. The work is based on an assignment designed by the artist’s father, Edward Buckingham, for his grade 4 classes. Students are asked to create an “inventory list” of an imagined present or future city. Using simple paper construction techniques each student creates a number of buildings, roughly in scale with each other. At the end of this exercise the group is asked to physically fit the city together, deciding which buildings “belong” next to which, subsequently forming a model city that reflects and expresses their ideals. To produce this work, Matthew Buckingham collaborated with students of an Arts Umbrella summer class, planning and creating their city over four consecutive days.
The title work of the exhibition, Creative Destruction (2006), a small text-based sculptural work, shares a critical investigation into cities. The work presents a short paragraph as a condensation of the economic idea of “creative destruction,” theorized by Werner Sombart and Joseph Schumpeter, and later analyzed by David Harvey.
Utilizing photography, film, video, audio, writing and drawing, Buckingham’s work questions the role that social memory plays in contemporary life. His projects create physical and social contexts that encourage viewers to question what is most familiar to them. His work has been seen in one-person and group exhibitions at ARC / Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris; Camden Arts Centre, London; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Hamburger Bahnhof National Gallery, Berlin; Kunst-Werke, Berlin; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitechapel, London and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He was a 2003 recipient of the DAAD Artist in Berlin Fellowship.
This project is made possible with special support from the BC Arts Council Special Project Assistance – Innovations program. Additional thanks to Arts Umbrella, Ian Barbour, Erin Boniferro, Stephanie Damgaard, Pete Hagge, Sarah Hoemberg, Jessica Jang, and Josh Olson.
Very special thanks to Ella Arnatt, Ari Bone, Andres Corina, Liron Gertsman, Jiwon Har, Liam Hayden, Laura Joyce, Soojin Kang, Sofia Patterson, Caroline Pillon, Kathryn Seifert, and Sarina Yagihara.
