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Nostalgic Artificiality
Farnoosh Rafaie
The strangely dark and delirious work of Mike Kelley elicits an almost profane reinterpretation of the past in a fabricated connection to the individuals who experience them. His work is explicitly an exhibition of psychologically laden objects. A layering of a highly repressed past, in its disregard, becomes a more pervasive and sustained blanketed wound. These unconscious projections of the artist somehow serve to define a veneered content of remembrance: fragments hidden below a sculpted form to express nostalgic artificiality. The unseen and idiosyncratic manifest in the ancient typological reference of the burial mound. It is in this formation where the mounds exist as this kind of abstracted artificiality. The mounds, made from the earth as hidden and embedded elements with an appearance of naturalism, collectively create a mock landscape that simulates topography. Evoking ancient artificiality, the burial mound serves to inform the art space embedded within the site in Los Angeles: the Rowena Reservoir. Evolving beyond its initial use, the reservoir retains its past fragments augmented into its new artificial form. The project restructures the once-functional reservoir from its current state of pseudolandscape to the expressed relic woven into the earth. Adhering to the arbitrary and nodal grid, the art space is informed by the unexpressed geometry as it extracts the entombed reservoir from below grade and blends a new layer of artificiality upon the site. Galleries rest within the reservoir, whose function evolves into a hybridization between the new and old. The art space is a monument to artificiality, blending into the locale rather than completely opposing it. Rather than adhering to the homogeneity of pure utility, the proposed space becomes an embodiment of the found and discarded, and a connection to a state of other. It is in coalescing these fragments of continued remembrance where I propose to create architecture of nostalgic artificiality.