In Absentia
2024
In Absentia is a fictional exhibition installed in an office in Midtown Manhattan, exploring glass as an architecturalmaterial imbued with utopian ideas. This show displays miniatures of 20th-century glass architectures that were either destroyed or neverbuilt: El Lissitzky's Cloud-Iron, the Crystal Palace, Bruno Taut’s Glass House, Frank Lloyd Wright's East Village Towers, and Mies van der Rohe's Friedrichstrasse Skyscraper. These models are owned by a fictional filmmaker, Raymond Fluorescence, whose obsession with crystals led him to envision a cinematic language based on total transparency. However, Fluorescence’s dream of capturing the essence of transparency through architecture and film ultimately failed, leaving these structures—both real and imagined—as lasting monuments to unfulfilled utopian vision.
In Absentia, 3D objects modeled and rendered in Maya
In Absentia
In Absentia, wall text and exhibition map
Excerpt from exhibition wall text: "On June 17, 1965, Fluorescence wrote the final scene for one of his unrealized films titled 'in Absentia':'I dreamed that I was floating through a museum with one single room where I was the curator. The room is sterilized and cold. The walls are made of mirrors, yet my own reflection is missing from my sight. I go up to a glass display case with dim blue light. In it, next to others, stands a crystal, dully shining, inert, model of a building. I am no less big, no less small than the object. There is no inside of an outside...'"