The House Which Grows
6 Lambda prints mounted on aluminum and under Plexiglas, various sizes, from 22 x 34 cm to 131 x 100 cm, 2012. Courtesy of Bunkier Sztuki Contemporary Art Gallery, Kraków
The Polish landscape features a quite frequent architectural phenomenon: that of unfinished houses, where people already live, and which have continued expanding, although evidently the original design has not been completed. "The House Which Grows" is inspired by this phenomenon, but also exaggerates it. The first image shows a nearly finished house which, in the subsequent images, appears to be growing. Eventually, in the last image, the house has become a huge chaotic and shapeless construction. In this regard "The House Which Grows" is not so much a reflection on some positive utopia projecting itself in a hopefully radiant future, but rather on a negative, dark, dystopian vision of the city. There is a difference, still, with the classic 20th century dystopias. The former implied a centralized state which governed the expansion and development of the city from above. "The House Which Grows," on the other hand, relies rather on the free will of dynamic and enterprising homeowners whose appetite for real estate drives the city to the verge of insanity.
Artist's Bio:
Nicolas Grospierre is a photographer, of architecture mainly, and an artist working in the expanded field of photography. His practice has been focused on both documentary projects and more conceptual works. His documentary projects have often explo- red the collective memories of, and the hopes linked to modernist architecture, now that the utopias related to them have faded away. On the other hand, his conceptual photographic works tend to emphasize mind games, at the same time displaying attractive, sensual images or even installations.