'failures' Reborn
The Age
Friday October 12, 2007
IN THE computer-aided sculptures of James Angus, architectural "failures" reinvent as brilliantly twisted follies made from laser-cut plywood, spruce, and MDF. Palazzo della Civita Italiana (pictured) becomes a looping mobius strip satirising the progress narratives of Italian futurist architecture. Elsewhere, utopian projects by Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer are "remodelled" but the heroic impulse of the originals is disarmed. Ordinary objects further disrupt the architectural program. Soccer balls, dropped from 10,670 metres are plaster-cast at the instant of flaccid death; an ape's cranium in faceted timber inlays mocks our object fetishism. And yet these forms become curiously, darkly precious again. -- Frances Johnson
James Angus, Bendigo Art Gallery, 42 View Street, Bendigo, until November 25, www.bendigoartgallery.com.au
© 2007 The Age