Kendall Buster: What Blooms
Equally inspired by the monumental and the microscopic, artist Kendall Buster first studied microbiology before pursuing a sculptural practice. This solo exhibition is comprised of two new sculptural installations and an ongoing drawing project reflecting the artist’s interest in the merging of organic forms with speculative built spaces. Operating as scale models for imaginary buildings and a cataloguing of curious specimens, these works are informed at once by dreamt places and biological morphologies.
Residing between object and architecture, the ephemeral suspended sculpture at the center of the gallery is an assemblage of accessible human-scale chambers constructed with a play between interior and exterior space. Transparent skins of agricultural shade-cloth suggestive of porous membranes embrace viewers and offer complex overlays of one form into another. This biomorphic ‘floating city organism’ explores notions of scale as experienced both through the body and through the mind’s eye.
Accompanying this floating city is a complex planar formation operating as a kind of scale model for a built environment. Fortress-like yet playful, the work evokes mazes, honeycombs, futuristic towers, and botanical growth. Though resembling shaped sheet metal, the work is made of paper and glue, constructed with sewing pins and surfaced in graphite.
A grid of 50 digital prints, scans from graphite on mylar drawings, also propose imagined spaces. They are part of an ongoing drawing project, an ever-expanding study journal and inventory for a speculative built environment of biological architecture.
