“ARCHITECTURES OF IMAGINATION” CONCLUDES WITH A CLOSING EVENT AT THE HISTORIC TOWER HOTEL

Aluna Art Foundation announces the closing event for Architectures of Imagination, a group exhibition presented on the first floor of the historic Tower Hotel, in the heart of Little Havana with the participation of Ozan Atalan, Carola Bravo, Ivan Castillo-Lagrange, Brookhart Jonquil, Claudio Marcotulli, Jennifer Printz and Alex Yudzon. The event will take place on July 31 at 7:00 p.m.

In the book Air and Dreams, Gaston Bachelard associated clouds with the mobilizing power of invention and its transformations. The exhibition Architectures of Imagination includes Printz’s unexpected ascending geometries, which float among clouds or contain them, opening delicate passages of communication between the visible and the invisible in the matrix of the universe. In turn, Castillo-Lagrange sculpts his clouds as three-dimensional polytopes of cardboard or metal made to float on the ceiling. Jonquil paints his clouds in the open air; not on canvas, but on geometric metal structures whose angles and vectors multiply in mirrors where we see ourselves, or that float in the sky of a cosmic semi-sphere at whose center a single glass planet reflects the viewer’s image like an eye that looks back at the spectator, releasing them from the density of what's real.

In addition to all those impossible constructions in the clouds—born from the incandescent imagination—the exhibition includes photographs of the ephemeral abstract sculptures that Yudzon builds over the course of a night with the furniture of roadside hotels; and the poetic work of his land-art installations with objects that teach ways of building a house not only with branches but with playing cards or books, set across rocks or seas.

The exhibition extends into a garden where Castillo-Lagrange’s levitating sculptures hang from the trees, along with one of his light-based works, whose tall metallic form bends as delicately as a slight paper fold. A radiant yellow Marcotulli’s sculpture functions as a playful structure that creates alternate passages of human time in connection to the universe. se. It enters into dialogue with a video that records Ozan Atalan gesture of challenging the way humans count time, replacing the minute hand with branches that mark the rhythm of the waves.

In other small luminous sculptures, Marcotulli examines the affective subjectivity of human perception, while the light with which Jonquil illuminates an autonomous, self-contained vegetal world—growing inside a sealed transparent polyhedron—offers us multiple angles from which to observe how nature organizes itself. A video by Carola Bravo “enters” a historical Monet painting. She extends, with the trace of her lines on the real walls of the Tower Hotel, the game of perception in movement.

Beyond the individual authorship of all these artistic constructions, there is a convergence that brings them close to C. G. Jung’s intuition of the unus mundus, or the mirror-like relationship between the human psyche and matter, which brings the images and symbols we conceive closer to the patterns of nature, as we don't always perceive the unity between what exists and who we are. At the same time, the totality of all these works—impossible in a certain sense, yet boasting a powerful, undeniable existence—constitutes tangible proof that it is possible to cultivate, with the water and air of dreams, creative experiences that shift the limits of the established world. All of these architectures possess the inherent joy of challenging their own density and immobility to release an ascending reverie.

Architectures of Imagination has been possible with the support of the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, the Cultural Affairs Council, the Mayor, and the Miami-Dade County Board of County Commissioners.