Echo Utopias (2008)

Penelope Stewart is an artist, curator/writer and publisher whose multi-disciplinary practice encompasses expansive architectural installations/interventions, alternative photography, artist books, and works on paper. Re-current themes address notions of cultural memory, of time and space and a considered approach to the relationship between objects, architecture, gardens, landscape and the places between – places to intervene, inhabit and above all activate. Whether it has been historic sites such as Musée Barthète, a small museum in France, or a museum like the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY or the deconstruction/reconstruction of a 19 th century book of botany using cyanotype, her intentions are to create sensory spaces, haptic experiences, transforming our perceptions and possible readings of space, time and memory.

Domus – 32” x 52”
Terminal 1&2 – 30” x 43”
Vitres 1&2 – 30”x 43”
lambda archival prints

Echo Utopias, is a suite of photographs of real and imaginary Victorian glass structures. In most cases they have been inverted so as to print the negative of the image thus emphasizing the inner and outer while suggesting traces of time: time present, time past. The green cast reminiscent of glass merged with the classical black and white photograph adds to the ephemeral rendering of these spaces. Indirectly this coupling references the invention of photography which occurred around the same time as the engineering and architectural ability to build the glass Palm Houses and Arcades.