The Ruins · Claudia Hart

The Ruins implements still lifes, the classical form of a memento mori, to contemplate the decay of western civilization. Hart revises the canons of modernist painting and the manifestos of failed utopias. Exhibited works are meditations on the flow of history, expressed as a cycle of decay and regeneration—an antidote to a world in crisis, navigating from a Eurocentric paradigm of fixed photographic capture into a reality of malleable and inherently unstable computer simulations and systemic collapse. The central artwork is a three-channel audiovisual animation tracking through a claustrophobic game world from which there is no escape. As the maze unravels, Hart introduces low polygon models—computer-made replications of copyright-protected paintings by Matisse and Picasso. Music by Edmund Campion mixes failed Utopian ideologies: Jefferson On American Liberty, The Bauhaus Manifesto, Fordlandia, and Jim Jones's The Open Door, using Hart's voice as instrument and soundtrack. The exhibition also features The Still Life With Flowers by Henri Fantin-Latour as a sculptural object in walnut, ashwood, maple, and resin—a copy of a copy of a copy; custom augmented wallpapers viewable through The Ruins App; and three monumental animations—The Orange Room, Green Table, and Big Red—importing compositional structures from Matisse's Red Paintings to propose a paradigm shift in painting practice.

Works