Curtis Schreier
February 17th - March 24th 2024
With guest curator LIZ FLYNTZ
Swamp Alps: Post Carbon Collapse / Future Visions
Schreier presents a vision for a future of Louisiana’s oil industry: a scale model of an artificial “Alps” created from the skeletal steel remains of abandoned oil derricks, covered in a mesh of native plants. These Louisiana Alps will act as combination seawall, environmental reuse strategy, and leisure zone — offering visitors a place to relax and take in more expansive views.
Curtis Schreier is a visionary designer and printmaker. Since his days as an architecture student at RISD, he’s been keeping a series of black leather-bound notebooks, identical in shape and size, that contain sketches, schematic drawings, and diary entries conceptualizing and reflecting on some of the key moments in radical American architecture, media art, documentary, and environmental design.
Inside the notebooks is a personal annotated and illustrated history of design and production processes for some of the best-known projects by germinal media art and architecture group Ant Farm, including schematic drawings and notes on Media Burn (1975), The Inflatocookbook (1971), Dolphin Embassy (1974) and Truckstop Network (1970).
Beyond providing additional insight into the genesis of these essential projects, the notebooks include copious notes and drawings for unrealized and lesser-known projects, including wearable apparatuses for toting early video gear, mechanical time capsule contraptions and plotting devices, environmental installations, as well as various inflatable and dome construction designs.
Each notebook encompasses a year (more or less) in the life of an artist at the center of some of the most crucial moments during the foment of late-mid-century counterculture and radical architecture in the United States. The exhibition will contain a selection of the notebook drawings accompanied This exhibition will include a display of the original notebooks as well as a series of editioned prints, created collaboratively with several young designers who “remixed” Schreier’s designs in new layouts and with new print methodologies.
BIO
Curtis Schreier (b. 1944) is an architect and artist. He was a designer in the practice of Lawrence Halprin, landscape architect and early proponent of urban redevelopment. From the late 1960s, he was a core member of SouthCoast Pneumads, an experimental design and architecture group, and later of TVTV (or Top Value Television) an early video journalism and documentary collective.
He is perhaps best known for his work with Ant Farm, a radical architecture, design, performance and media art group, developing the visionary ideation and graphic design for some of the group’s best known projects, including Media Burn, Dolphin Embassy, Truckstop Network, The Inflatocookbook, and Real City(c).
He lives in San Francisco.
ABOUT THE CURATOR
Liz Flyntz (b. 1979) is a designer and curator. Her work often uses archives, and particularly archival artwork using and documentation about new technology, as a lens through which to reconsider historical narratives about power and dissent. She’s interested in collective creative practice and systems design.
She co-authored and edited The Present Is the Form of All Life, a book about the time capsule works created between 1968-1978 by media art, performance, and architecture group Ant Farm. Currently she is working on a book about the brief and explosive intersection of progressive pedagogy, generous foundation funding, video, protest culture, and radical architecture in the early 1970s.
WEB
Pricing and further documentation available on request. To purchase work, contact gallery@yeswecannibal.org. All work is copyright of the artist 2024.
