Future Collapse
Artist Statement
Future Collapse
Robert Minervini’s third solo exhibition with Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco, CA in 2019.
In these works, screen printed California cityscapes and landscapes are backdrops to arrangements of stenciled classical Roman sculptures, cacti and succulents, Etruscan urns, and Egyptian figurines, all placed on shelves inside tiled vitrines. It is a proposition that both honors and disrupts traditions of still-life and landscape painting: are these objects relics of the past, objects of the present, or possibilities of the future? Are the vitrines transparent, or tiled with photo decals? A sense of dislocation and disorientation begins to seep in as forms and landscapes are repeated throughout the work, often silhouetted to further disassociate from their real-world counterparts. These objects are disconnected from any cultural significance, reminiscent of a Cabinet of curiosity, and Minervini's natural spaces are only facsimiles of nature. This constructed world is as familiar as it is foreign.