Mono.Kultur 24

Mono.Kultur 24, Cyprien Gaillard

Mono.Kultur 24, Cyprien Gaillard
Softcover, 48 pp., offset 4/4, 150 x 200 mm
Edition of 5000
ISSN 1861-7085
Published by Mono.Kultur

$9.00 ·

It was late January when Cyprien Gaillard arrived, the time of year when the city is cold and grey. Yet the weather could not dampen his enthusiasm for urban exploration. He could hardly wait to wrap up the installation of his exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts to see Columbus, the state capital of Ohio. In line with his artistic interests in the contradictions of our contemporary landscapes, his list of must-sees included structures and places that others would rather ignore, and sites where contemporary claims to history have given rise to surprising visual manifestations.

We had started the day with a drive-by tour of fraternity and sorority houses — a staple of any North American university campus. Equipped with a Polaroid camera, Cyprien Gaillard began to survey the facades: Clustered together in an area of old, tree-lined streets, the architecture borrowed liberally from various periods and styles: Lily-white, Greco-Roman temple fronts alternated with Colonial-style brick facades, Tudor half-timber and 1960s austerity. The buildings laid bare the friction between the grandiloquent desires of the past and the rather more mundane present. Just as we were about to leave, a handful of student revellers emerged from one of the fraternities with beer cans in hand and posed for a photograph in the brisk morning air.