KEVIN APPEL
b. 1967, United StatesThroughout his career Kevin Appel has engaged in a dialogue with architectural space; in particular the cool lines of modernist American architects. His most recent works however, with clever remodeling, reduce the vernacular American home to the sum of its parts. Pipes, plumbing and shards of wood emerge from the interiors of log cabins and tree houses to create semi abstract assemblages playing with scale and proportion. Patchworks of stripes, textiles, wood grain, Formica and bricks, painted with exquisite precision and perfect geometry, humorously caricature modernist design.
Elements of the great outdoors and rudimentary structures collide with crisp contemporary pattern, creating overlapping piles of swirling debris. A complex spatial layering of collage, compact the works into a flat plane. There is confusion as to whether this is a construction or a collapse. Interior spaces are turned inside out hinting at some domestic crisis or is it simply nature exacting its revenge on the suburban sprawl.
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