Use Your Illusion: Barbara Kasten's "Architectural Sites"
Related Member: Nate Abramowski
In this lecture, Graham grantee Alex Kitnick will explore the critical stakes of Barbara Kasten's Architectural Sites, her photographic series from the 1980s that artfully staged important works of American architecture, from Arata Isozaki’s Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, to Richard Meier’s High Museum of Art, Atlanta. Created at the height of postmodern theory, Kasten’s work submits iconic buildings to distorting angles and colored lights, thus transforming already vertiginous structures into truly illusory spaces. Kitnick argues that these photographs offer a unique form of criticism that seek to heighten—rather than deconstruct—the effects of an emerging Postmodernism, and that these effects are increasingly familiar today.
