Sam Jacob, ‘Against Nature’ Exhibition at Betts Project, London, UK.
EXHIBITION: 24 FEBRUARY — 15 APRIL 2023
BETTS PROJECT 100 CENTRAL STREET LONDON EC1V 8AJ
Against Nature is an exhibition about architecture, landscape and nature. It is also about the guilt, power, loss, and hope intrinsic to architecture.
Architecture is always against nature. Against as in next to. Against as in contrasting. Against as in protecting. Against as in anticipating. Against as in resisting. Against as in facing. Against as in touching. Against as in challenging. Against as in opposing. Against as defending. Against as defying. Against as a debit. Against as towards. Against as before. Against as comparison. Against as compensation. Against as contradicting. Against as preparation. Against as in supporting.
Architecture is, fundamentally, the imposition of a different order upon the world. An order that manifests abstract ideas as new realities. These idea-realties radically reorder the world socially, politically, economically, environmentally and symbolically. Architecture proposes new versions of the world and new ways to be in those worlds.
Against Nature features two new series of works by Sam Jacob. Ritual Litter features additions of coloured elements to antique prints of neolithic monuments. Against Nature is made up of found landscape oil paintings with black geometric forms painted into them.
These traditions of landscape and objects-in-landscapes come with their own ideas about separation from and remaking of nature. Their reworking suggests architecture’s symbolic and ritualistic power to summon new kinds of world and new ways of being in the world. To rearrange the world socially, politically, economically, and environmentally. Architecture as a conceptual act projected onto the land that contains the possibility of liberation, and the potential to reconstruct the home we have never had.