“Metropolis Experiment is part architectural model, part mad science: the whole city is a laboratory. But instead of shiny stainless and gleaming glassware in sterile white surrounds, we are presented with rusty tripods and salt crystals that creep up and over everything, corroding as they go. In Metropolis Experiment something has gone horribly wrong: it’s a ruined model city, a metaphor. Metropolis Experiment is Clement’s third recent body of work which responds to the vivid prognostications of JG Ballard’s 1962 post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel, The Drowned World. What links these works is the image of the ruined city, an image Ballard conjured so evocatively in The Drowned World. Thanks to its scale, Metropolis Experiment draws on the conceptual qualities of architectural models (as well as ruins) in order to make a point. As theorists are fond of pointing out, all ruins simultaneously embody both the present and the past. Meanwhile, architectural models are inherently aspirational. They embody potential, physically manifested, but not quite realised. They represent the future. As a ruined model city (a combination of both) Clement’s artwork adds a third temporal stream: the future already devastated. Metropolis Experiment is a premonition and a warning” – Tracey Clement.
Tracey Clement: Metropolis Experiment, 2-17 June 2017. AirSpace Projects
