129 - 05|01|10

MAP OFFICE [Gutierrez+Portefaix]
Simply enjoy the scenery
2009
Gallery VER, Bangkok
Grid versus Chaos
Curated by Alvaro Rodriguez Fominaya
09.01 – 05.02.2010
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For most of us, the island is an ideal temporary escape to our lives. Feeding our imagination with images of unaltered beaches and pristine wilderness, the island is an accessible therapeutic refuge. Yet, the level of expectation often matches with an equivalent level of frustration. Simply Enjoy The Scenery anticipates bulimic demand from the public to be delighted. A famous spot feature in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), Koh Tapu disappoints visitors because of its actual small size. In the James Bond movie, the island served as a base where the villain Scaramanga hid his laser weapon, yet a sense of déjà-vu as you set eyes on the famous mushroom-shaped rock. For this exhibition, we played around your possible disappointment when approaching the 100 + 1 islands at 1:10th of their original seize. Here, exhibition and landscape share a similar power of attraction with an infinite set of ways of perceiving a projected reality. For those coming with too much expectations we just would like to say: Simply enjoy the scenery!
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A landscape of models - 100 islands + 1 [Koh Tapu]
MDF wood, cardboard, foam, acrylic mirror, plans.
Dimension variable
2009
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The exhibition refers to the different possibilities of communication that the idea of grid offers, confronted to the notion of chaos in daily life in South Asia cities. The artists in the exhibition have produced new works that relate to different issues connected to the two “working concepts” that are the starting points of this project. Each artist or collective has offered different responses to this invitation for the production of a new work of art, either working with the local community, such as the project by Wei Leng Tay; researching on the imaginary of a grid-like island landscape as in MAP Office, of searching for an inner fictional space as in Amy Cheung.