VESSELS
An exhibition by Architect Jonathan Houser.
Exhibition period 22th September –  22nd of October 2017.

VESSELS is an exhibition that shows three architectural models of time and space. Three Vessels, some to be understood as concrete ships for travelling, and all, as metaphorical containers of ideas about architecture. A memorial for perished war sailors, a house for moths and a generation star ship, together form a temporal span embodying the past, the present and the future in an attempt at capturing the frailty of the moment and the vastness of eternity in the formal language of architecture. The works presented in the exhibition are all experiments in finding a poetic narrative for the art of building that is founded on ideas harvested outside the realm of architecture and the mainstream spectacle of our blogging times. Thus, a sonar image form the seabed off the coast of France becomes the proposal for a memorial that sends and echo from the past into the future, forming a wooden relief exactly modelled and transferred via digital crafting, the fading outlines of a Danish cargo ship sunken in 1944. Holometabola, the metamorphosis of moths and butterflies inside their cocoon, that completely rearranges every molecule of their organisms, from larvae to liquid to winged creatures of the night, becomes the founding principle for a temporary pavilion that re-interprets motives from the baroque period. The Circular River as imagined by Botticelli in the etchings for Dantes Divine Comedy is turned into the concept for a star ship that is destined for eternal travel through interstellar space driving the cinematic narrative of a documentary film.

The exhibition is crafted at The Danish Art Workshops and supported by Dreyers Fond