Thingsmatter

FINALIST

‘Gravity Flower’

My apple blossom,

you will grow up to fall down,

or you’ll be sliced apart.

Fight gravity while you can;

lead us into temptation.

Boullée and Tinguely saw different futures, and they celebrated different pasts. One designed an unbuildable monument for a celebrity physicist; the other jury-rigged a memorial for an anonymous suicide pilot. But the two artists, and the nominal subjects of their memorials, have this in common: unusually profound relationships with gravity.

The tapestry design is a fragile constellation formed from clean white coffers, within a field of colored frames. The apple tree branch and blossom is an optical artifact, unlike Newton’s apocryphal muse. But even its image seems pulled apart and downwards by invisible forces; it will soon dissolve into its woven backdrop, a blurry mirror of the river, ground, and sky outside Pharos.