DryStoneGarden

The other thing, along with drawing, that saved Venice for me was going to the Biennale. I hadn’t planned on going, but it was out of the heat and away from the main tourist hordes and in the end I liked it a lot.

I found a lot of the pavilions interesting. Maybe the best was the German exhibition about the Berlin Wall, with a couple of perspective games — isolated panels that from a certain vantage point appeared to be a continuos wall, and a mirror trick that made the wall appear infinite — and genuinely interesting info about the wall’s past and present. I gave it my highest rating, a full Hasselhoff.

But my favorite was the Mexico exhibition: architectural models fabricated in stone and mounted as wall panels. Maybe I’m the exact target audience. Afterwards I found it was completely absent from all of the ‘best of the biennale’ listicles; maybe it’s not flashy enough, there’s a lot of gray and a lot of the same stone. But I think it’s a great series; there’s a nice range of scales, a varying degree of abstraction, and the fabricators used a few different techniques to make the models.

Another half dozen are below. (more…)